In “Pentecost2017,” Stream editors have shared personal stories of the ways their fellow believers have changed their lives. Here senior editor John Zmirak reflects on the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church.

I’ll admit it. In my younger, less meditative days I looked at the Feast of Pentecost primarily as a reason to throw a party that featured 12 flambéed dishes — one for each of the tongues of fire that came down on the apostles and Mary. (Those recipes, by the way, are still delicious, especially the Flaming Spinach Salad. See my Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living.) It also seemed a good time to encourage Christians to speak in tongues, provided that tongue was Latin.

Now I’m older, sadder, more ecumenical. So I’m driven to think more deeply about the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. What part does this silent partner in the Trinity play?

For one thing, he makes Christianity something more than an antiquarian cult. Without Him, you and I would read about Jesus. We’d think about Him. We might even receive Him sacramentally. But that would be akin to corresponding with a loved one who lived in another city, who’d visit from time to time.

Because Jesus does not dwell on earth anymore. He left at the Ascension, and promised to send the Spirit. It’s the Spirit who lives in us, as the Shekinah dwelt among the Jewish people.

An Alien Element on Earth

It’s the Spirit that guides the church rightly, and always has. He helped the Apostles reject Simon Magus, the gnostic Gospels, the fantasies of the Montanists and the oh-so-clever compromises of the Semi-Arians. He kept hunted slaves from despairing in the Catacombs, and drove the Fathers out into the Desert.

The Spirit moved in the heart of Constantine, to end the persecutions. He told Augustine to “take and read” the Bible. He whispered to Francis of holy Poverty, and Ignatius of the need for a new and quite different crusade. The Spirit told Karol Wotyjla that the Nazis’ 1000-year-Reich would never last, and that Socialist Man would never even be born.

The living, breathing wisdom of God’s own Holy Spirit is what separates Christian thinking from a really, really sophisticated worldly ideology. If it were mere human wisdom that made up the church’s legacy, we would not have survived such apparently terminal catastrophes as struck the church over and over: The Schism between East and West. The Babylonian Captivity of the papacy. The wars of the Reformation. The capture of the fragmented churches by the power of the state. The marriage of throne and altar, and their bloody divorce after the French Revolution. The church’s apparent exhaustion and surrender today in the face of utilitarian hedonism.

No worldly, human philosophy could survive being “discredited” that many times. It would be bankrupt and ridiculous, like Divine Right monarchy, Marxist socialism, or racialist eugenics. But however Christian thinkers, rulers, and prelates compromised themselves by cleaving too close to the things of this world, something held them back.

Some aspect of their writing and thought was not quite of this earth. It could not be reduced to Machiavellian politics, self-interest, or calculation. It was made of an alien element, not found on the Periodic Table. That element linked them all and knitted the vast circus of saints and sinners, soldiers and scholars together.

It Can’t Be a Thing at All

What unites intellectuals like Justin Martyr with simple-minded mystics like St. Therese? Warriors like Joan of Arc with anti-slave crusaders like William Wilberforce? Brilliant courtiers like Thomas More with blunt truth-tellers like Clemens von Galen, the bishop who flouted the Nazis?

Simple logic will tell us it can’t be a “thing” at all. No thing has this many qualities. Nothing is this complex, this multifaceted and flexible. The only reality known to us that can answer to that description bears the sacred name of “person.” It’s the personal God Who haunts us. The Comforter sent from above. Or as we learned in catechism class, “the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity.”

Happy Pentecost! It’s the birthday of the Church. I’m tempted to light some candles. Or maybe some salads.