What we mean when we say in the Creed, ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit’ (2024)

The Church’s teaching points us authoritatively towards the fullness of truth and love, which is God, guarding against error in both praxis and belief and thus enabling us to set our hearts on Him. But no formulation of faith could ever exhaust the truth, nor any act of love exceed Love itself: God remains forever beyond the reach of our language and the grasp of our intellects; he is beyond, that is, anything we can ever say or think, and his love, unlike ours, is infinite.

And yet, for all our ‘unknowing’, God is more intimately and more inwardly present to us than we are to ourselves. That indwelling of God is the Holy Spirit, who is the life by which we live, the light by which we see, and the love by which we love both him and each other. The Holy Spirit is the Father’s love for his Son and his Son’s love for Him; and it is by the gift of the Holy Spirit that we share in that love and life, God’s own love and life. So, when we say in the Creed, “I believe in the Holy Spirit”, we’re articulating not just one of the things we believe, but a truth that is presupposed to everything we believe. As our visual field is to our seeing, so the Holy Spirit is to our believing: it is the Holy Spirit that makes faith possible.

Though a profession of belief in the Holy Spirit appears in the most ancient formal creed, the Apostles’ Creed, it wasn’t until the end of the fourth century that a full article explicating what we believe about the Holy Spirit appeared in the Creed we now most often use at Mass, the Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed. That time gap between the events on the day of Pentecost, the Jewish Feast of Weeks, described in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, and the fuller explication in the Nicene Creed of what we believe about the Holy Spirit reminds us that, just as God revealed himself in time, so the saving truths of faith come to us through time, precisely through the working of the Holy Spirit, as promised. Jesus said explicitly that he was sending us the Holy Spirit to bring to our minds all that he had taught us: “I will send the Spirit of truth, who will teach you all truth”. It follows that the truths given to us in faith here on earth will be forever unfolding, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, who is at work in the whole Church, and articulated, as and when needed, in the Church’s magisterium.

So, it took time for the Church to understand that our communion with God and one another in the gift of charity, is made possible precisely through the gift of the Holy Spirit, who is love, the love that unites the Father and the Son and, as such, the love that unites us to the Father and the Son, and to one another. That’s why genuinely selfless love leads us directly into the mystery of God, who is Love Itself. Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. The actual events at Pentecost also have much to teach us.

Pentecost is sometimes spoken of as Babel reversed. If the cacophonous babble of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis represented the fragmentation of the human race by failing to understand one another, the reversal at Pentecost was represented by the fact that everybody to whom the apostles preached understood what they had to say, not, as the text is at pains to say, in the same language, but in their own language; not, that is, in one, common language, but in many, diverse languages. Those present in Jerusalem from many parts of the world experience the same truth, expressed in many, different languages. Diversity flourishes, in other words, under the inspiration of the Sprit, rather than being suppressed. Indeed, diversity in unity and unity in diversity, one of the marks of genuine, respectful love, is the distinctive gift of the Spirit, a Godgiven, defining characteristic of our humanity, intrinsic to our very being, made as we are in the image and likeness of God, the Blessed Trinity.

The raw human experience of the first disciples at Pentecost also has much to teach us. Ever since Jesus had been physically removed from them, the Apostles and the others had been reduced to a timid, selfprotective huddle, locked away in an upper room, wishing that things had turned out differently, looking to the past and longing to have their old lives back. But the gift of the Holy Spirit dispelled their paralysing reticence and debilitating nostalgia: once fearful, they were now fearless; once silent, they now couldn’t stop talking about what God had done in raising Jesus from death. The text is vividly explicit: they were like men “drunk on young wine”, a sentence squeamishly, omitted from today’s first reading. These diffident, regretful, bowed individuals, now burst forth from the upper room, changed beyond all recognition, alive in the Spirit.

That state of paralysis is familiar to us all. Feeling powerless to bring about the changes we yearn for, we often fall into the trap of putting our lives ‘on hold’, waiting for that ‘something more’ that will make the crucial difference; and, as a consequence, we miss here and now myriad movements of grace and promptings of the Spirit. What Pentecost powerfully reminds us is that the really important changes in our lives come, not from outside of ourselves, but from within, from the Holy Spirit, ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life’, who is permanently present to and with us. But God’s courtesy, like his love, is infinite: he invites our consent. To use a modern metaphor, the programme is already downloaded and installed, it needs only our consent to be activated. When we pray to the Holy Spirit, “Come, O Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle within us the fire of your love”, we should remember that he is already present in the depths of our being. Our prayer is our consent to ‘activation’, the expression of our desire to come alive in the Spirit. And the only genuine signs of coming alive in the Spirit are what St Paul lists in the second reading: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control”. These are the decisive and defining gifts that change everything, within and around us.