To ask God persistently for things appears virtuous according to Luke 11: “If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” (Luke 11:12)
Now, that’s a little abstract—what does the “gift of the Holy Spirit” mean? I’m becoming more and more convinced that the reason why God doesn’t answer—or doesn’t seem to answer—even our most persistent prayers lies in our assumption of the Holy Spirit should look like. Through popular images like the dove, we naturally assume the Holy Spirit’s role is one of peace giver or restorer or healer or provider. Ultimately, we assume the Spirit brings order out of our chaotic situations. For example, if there was a sickness in the family (a type of chaos), then God’s answered prayer would be the healing of that person (he restores order). Or if I struggled with chronic anxiety (chaos), then the Holy Spirit should help stabilise my emotions and make me functional again (order). In other words, the restoration of order is how I measure whether God has answered my prayer.
But the Holy Spirit is not always a bringer of order. He is also a bringer of chaos—or at least what feels like chaos from our fallen human end. God’s chaos is a creative chaos, rather than a destructive chaos. See, we assume the Holy Spirit only ever brings order by overrepresenting passages like Genesis 1. There we read how the Spirit that hovered over the mythological waters of chaos creates order through the division of the earth and heavens, the sea from the land etc. But then, let’s consider what happened at Pentecost! Here, the same Spirit that created order in Genesis now creates chaos among the first century Jews. Their institutional religion, practice and hierarchy are thrown into disarray, as well as the Jewish expectations of whom the Spirit ‘should’ be anointing. Or look a little bit further at St Paul’s missionary journey to the Gentiles, where the Spirit dictated a travel itinerary for Paul that was chaotic to say the least and not in the least bit orderly as he had planned. The Spirit blows where he wills (John 3:8) John tells us.
Consider now, that an essential part of holiness consists of detaching ourselves from idols and sinful habits, of which the Spirit’s role is to firstly cast asunder those attachments! Anyone who has progressed in the spiritual life can attest that the detachment from idols is a messy, chaotic work that isn’t immediately rectified with supernatural order. Now the Holy Spirit is actually re-ordering us back to God … but from our end, it may well just feel like plain chaos. In my own experience recently, earnest prayer regarding a type of social anxiety actually unearthed a whole volcano of suppressed anger. More chaos! But what I didn’t count on discovering was that in the chaos of it all, the Holy Spirit actually revealed (i) that a lot of social anxiety was actually linked to suppressed anger and (ii) this very anger stemmed from key childhood expectations within my family. To realise all this, and to finally feel the pain of it all was refreshing and liberating to say the least. And all because the Spirit responded to my prayer in chaos!
This is not at all to suggest that God’s Spirit doesn’t bring order as well. Certainly, we would all recognise the many, many times in prayer where God has clearly restored order in the chaos of our lives (e.g. a financial situation was provided for, a hopeless situation was resolved, someone was healed). Order is fundamentally of God. But sometimes, God’s order feels like chaos. What is more important is to remain receptive to the full working of the Spirit, whether he manifests in order or in chaos. After all, the scriptures themselves testifies to this both/and nature of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray for this faith.
The Timeless Quill 