Experience of the Holy Spirit

 

Years back I had a charismatic experience of the Holy Spirit in a Leeds Church. I came late to the service and as I came through the door heard loud harmonious singing without intelligible words. I fell to my knees awed by something so out of this world with hundreds of worshippers going with the flow of a holy humming successively rising and falling then dying down to silence. After that silence I heard one or two voices speaking words of consolation as if from God to the gathered worshippers along the lines ‘I love you… I have a way forward for you… trust in Me’. It left an impression deep in my soul sowing the seed of being open to the Holy Spirit’s gifts of tongues and prophecy mentioned in scripture. By contrast in terms of charismatic experience a young couple came to see me who had fallen in love at their workplace. Both were already married and one of their existing partners was awaiting the birth of their first child. As Christians they insisted their relationship was from the Holy Spirit who had led them together. Discouraged by their respective Christian networks they hoped that, as a priest who visited their workplace, I might help them. It was an awkward inconclusive hour in which I had to point out how guidance for Christians involves both the Holy Spirit and scripture. Adultery I suggested was unlikely to be inspired by the Holy Spirit since God’s Spirit and God’s word are one. We parted sadly. Both stories speak of subjective experience of the Holy Spirit, one encouraging and the other challenging. 

An experience in my youth of hearing singing in tongues at St Matthias Church in Leeds showed me a wider sense of the Spirit’s working in worship beyond opening up the meaning and power of scripture and sacrament which normally take centre stage focussed upon lectern and altar. Being among worshippers singing in tongues reminded me Christian worship is not just something we see before us but something that wells up from participants as we ‘present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship’ (Romans 12:1). Throughout church history people have been inspired and confounded by the experience of the Holy Spirit. The Acts of the Apostles is a whole book about such inspiration given to disciples and how it confounds particularly those opposed to Christianity. Sometimes it is believers who get confounded there as with the leading given by the Spirit to include Gentiles (non-Jews) in the Church on the same terms as Jewish believers. The first Church Council prefaces guidance on this inclusion by saying authoritatively ‘it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us’ (Acts 15:28). The consensus of believers about doctrine is seen as  an objective work of the Spirit Christ promised would guide disciples ‘into all the truth’ (John 16:13). In his teaching on the use of the Holy Spirit’s gifts of tongues and prophecy in Christian worship Paul is at pains both to encourage use of these gifts and to ask for them to be exercised with an eye to the consensus of believers under the authority of church leaders. ‘God is a God not of disorder but of peace… [in worship] all things should be done decently and in order’ (1 Corinthians 14:33,40). Earlier in that letter Paul presents the building up of love in the Christian community as the purpose behind experiencing the gifts of the Spirit which are to be used with an eye to enriching rather than disordering worship. 

Through the Christian centuries prophets have been raised up to challenge hypocritical ‘holding to the outward form of godliness but denying the Holy Spirit’s power’ (2 Timothy 3:5). They have done so by virtue of their direct experience of God. Such experiences have been vitalising yet controversial. Catherine of Siena lived in the 14th century when the church was much in need of reform. Her experience of the Spirit led to fearless countering of hypocrisy despite opposition. ‘We've had enough exhortations to be silent’ she said. ‘Cry out with a thousand tongues - I see the world is rotten because of silence’. Anglican priest John Wesley similarly experienced the Spirit in 1738 when his heart was ‘strangely warmed’. Though the eucharist was central to his life he held services with testimonies to personal experience of the Spirit. Bishop Joseph Butler asked him to leave his diocese questioning the authenticity of such experience saying famously: ‘the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Spirit is a horrid thing - a very horrid thing!’ Despite being a defender of divine intervention, stoutly opposing the ‘deism’ of his day that saw God remote from humanity, Butler opposed the Methodist movement with its stress on the experience of God as heretical, contributing to the separation of the movement from the Church of England by Wesley’s followers.

The way people talk about their experience of the Holy Spirit can offend even if church life without experience of God can be deadening in its unspiritual formality. Theologians have struggled to find language to help people with experience of the Spirit to talk about it without seeming arrogant in having a direct-line to the Lord. 14th century Gregory of Palamas introduced a helpful distinction between God's energies, which we experience by his Spirit, and his essence which lies beyond human knowledge. It rings true to contemporary psychology in that though we know and experience people closely, especially our spouses, there always remains about them what is unknowable or known to them alone. My own readiness to experience the Holy Spirit, deterred historically by a perception of the emotional excesses of Pentecostalism, was helped by this insight dear to Eastern Orthodoxy which came into its own following a faith crisis. I had gone on retreat with the advice to ask God to give me a vision of himself more to his dimensions and less to the narrow, dull image I then possessed. There was an answer to this prayer which involved a sense of in-filling by the Holy Spirit which within weeks involved the experience of praying in tongues. A friend who had this experience reassured me the experience was true to the faith and prayer of the church through the ages. He pointed me to an insistence in the Orthodox Philokalia on inviting the prayer of the mind to become the prayer of the heart. I read this book, which later became a resource for my discovering the Jesus Prayer. I find praying in tongues and praying the Jesus Prayer very similar in that both are controlled by the will though they flow from deep in the heart.

Some years back, rather confused after receiving the prayer gift of tongues, I read a book by Roman Catholic priest Simon Tugwell, ‘Did you receive the Spirit?’ which gave me much assurance. St Francis and the Cure d’Ars, two of my saint heroes, as well as Pope John XXIII evidently spoke in tongues. Through study of church history and the lives of the saints I came to see tongues as a love language granted the soul in answer to prayer, a gift that is subject to the will and, in Christianity at least, no evidence of derangement or hysteria. Further study using Kilian McDonnell & George Montague ‘Christian Initiation and Baptism in the Holy Spirit’ and their handbook ‘Fanning the Flame’ (picture) helped me see my experience of filling as completing my infant baptism. A helpful analogy is that of the relationship of its pilot light to a gas fire. Infant baptism lights the Spirit within whilst awaiting faith to grow so as to bring a Christian fully aflame with the Spirit. This insight has helped me invite others to seek the experience of baptism or filling in the Spirit as something optional yet vital linked to the faith and life of the church through the ages east and west.

Controversy about the experience of the Holy Spirit has not deterred the growth of both Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement in mainline churches such that a good section of the 21st century church owns this experience. ‘Charismatics’ in major denominations submit to a church authority which oversees a broader spectrum of spirituality than their own and through that submission many have risen to be inspirational pastors. Just as the Acts of the Apostles chronicles the spreading of the Gospel through such experience, recognition of God’s transforming presence in our lives and wanting to engage more fully with that and share with others about it is a key to Christian mission. In my experience opening up to the transforming power of the Spirit is nothing anti-intellectual or anti-institutional but rather a servant of the truth that is in Jesus and of bringing Christian communities more fully alive. ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses’ (Acts 1:8)