Vigils Reading

A reading from

FR KARL RAHNER

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What must we do in order to avoid stifling the Spirit? This is a dark and

difficult question. If it could ever be thought easy to answer it would be no

question at all. The real answer to it is itself a factor in the movement and

guidance of the Spirit, who himself ensures that he shall not be stifled. It can be

found, in the last analysis, not by the reflexive processes of theory and

speculation, but rather, at basis, through the sureness of instinct to be found in

Christian living.

The first thing that we could do, and do with all our hearts, would be to

acquire an attitude of caring; of recognizing with anxiety that it is possible to

stifle the Spirit. The Spirit can be stifled not indeed throughout the entire

Church, but still over so wide an area, and to such a terrible extent that we have

to fear that judgment which begins with the house of God. And for this reason

we must all face the possibility with fear and trembling that we could be the ones

who stifle the Spirit – stifle him through that pride in ‘knowing better’, that

inertia of heart, that cowardice, that unteachableness with which we react to

fresh impulses and new pressures in the Church.

How different many things would be if we did not so often react to what is

new with a self-assured superiority, an attitude of conservatism, adopted as a

defense not of the honor of God and the teaching and institutions of the Church,

but of our own selves, of what we have always been accustomed to, of the usual,

with which we can live without daily experiencing the pain of the new metanoia.

But if we realized, and with burning conviction, that we can also be judged for

our omissions, for a general obtuseness and inertia of heart which, though

indefinable, extends over all spheres of our lives, for our culpable lack of

creative imagination and boldness of spirit, then we should lend a sharper ear,

keener eye, a livelier anticipation to the slightest indication that somewhere that

Spirit is stirring whose inspiration is not merely confined to the official

pronouncements and directives of the Church, or to the holders of official

positions in her.

Then we should be eagerly on the watch to see whether charisms were not

appearing, of which only a glimpse and a feeling can initially be obtained. Then

we would not make it a condition for admitting those charisms which the Spirit

wills to impart (a condition to which, however, we do not subject our own lives

and activities) that such charisms must have no element of the human in them,

nothing which has not yet been purified out. For this is not possible in view of

the fact that even the fire of the Holy Spirit burns up from the thorn-bush of our

human – all too human – nature.