the Holy Ghost broods

In the Divine Spirit—God within us, already promised, often with different words, by the Hebrew prophets, as in Jeremiah 31:31-34 and Isaiah 11:2—God takes on an indwelling character. The unnamable I AM becomes writ large on our hearts, revealing the “down and in” divine characteristic present since the beginning of time. Let’s call the Holy Spirit Implanted Hope.

Without God as Holy Spirit, there’s no inner momentum, élan vital, or aliveness to heal our wounds. When the Spirit is alive in people, they wake up from their mechanical thinking and enter the realm of co-creative power. As in Ezekiel’s vision, the water flows from ankles to knees to waist to neck as the New Earth is hydrated. (See Ezekiel 47:1-12.) Like Pinocchio, we move from wooden to real. We transform from hurt people hurting other people to wounded healers healing others. Not just as individuals but as shapers of history that keeps moving forward through the Spirit’s power…The Indwelling Spirit is this ability of humanity to keep going, to keep recovering from its wounds, to keep hoping.

                                                                        Richard Rohr, Daily Blog, May 18, 2019

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We get worn down

From the outside in

All the things that assail us

The hate and greed

The lies, the corruption

The Racism, the oppression and minimization

The faltering planet

All those thing erode us

Slowly wearing away at our hope

Our joy

Our ability to have empathy

We walk around too tired

Too wounded

Too fragile

To reach out to those around us

It is simply too hard to see the pain

The anxiety

The fear

And so we encapsulate

We hide

In our work

In our words

Even in our ideologies and causes

We function, but there is something missing

But God

Ah!

This One is not only around us

Is not only near us

But is in us

Call it Sacred Presence

Call it divine DNA

Call it the Holy Spirit

God has given us, as Sacred Children

Implanted hope

God has given us

The advocate

The guide

The counselor

And if we are awake to its present

If we are willing to give it room to work

It rebuilds us

From the inside out

I have my moments

When I want to quit

When I am too tired to care

When all seems futile

I have my moments

but then the Spirit

roars like fire

rages like a hurricane

it roils through my soul

cleansing, renewing

vitalizing

and then I start again

and again

and again

listening

caring

forgiving

sharing

giving

It does not matter how dried out I get

The moment I connect (like a vine to the branches)

To the Spirit

I am renewed

Gerard Manley Hopkins had it right…

“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”