Learning to see the Holy Spirit
God must be allowed to speak unpredictably. The Holy Spirit, the very voice of Divine Liberty, must always be like the wind in “blowing where he pleases” (John 3:8). In the mystery of the Old Testament there was already a tension between the Law and the Prophets. In the New Testament the Spirit is the new Law, and he is everywhere. He certainly inspires and protects the visible Church, but if we cannot see him unexpectedly in the stranger and the alien, we will not understand him even in the Church. We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan, or we will lose him in ourselves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction. How can we reveal to others what we cannot discover in them ourselves? We must, then, see the truth in the stranger, and the truth we see must be a newly living truth, not just a projection of a dead and conventional idea of our own — a projection of our own self upon the stranger.
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky in the USA. He wrote over 70 books, primarily on spirituality and social justice. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was a best-seller that impacted the post-World War II generation and caused many veterans and students across America to enter monastic life.