There is a place we reach when we’re doing the thing we’re particularly good at; most of us have felt it. It’s the moment when everything we know runs out, and yet something is still being asked of us.
A teacher or project manager midway through the plan when it all falls apart. The chaplain at the hospital bed with no idea what to do or say, if anything at all. The one at three in the morning, out of ideas, comforting someone who won’t be settled. We come to the end of ourselves, yet there is still more to be done.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, whatever it is comes. The right words or the right silence, the gesture or flash of inspiration, the inclination to be patient and pray, the very thing that moment needed, shows up. Afterward, upon reflection, we think, “That was good. Better than I thought I had in me. Where did it come from?”
That something, or rather someone, has a name: the Holy Spirit. Now, it is tempting to think of the Holy Spirit as an occasional visitor, a rush of wind at Pentecost, that feeling you get from a beautiful worship service, or after a really great Bible study conversation. While that may be true, it doesn’t begin to do justice to the Spirit’s work in our lives because it is the Spirit who gives us the way forward when we are at the edge of our capacities.
While the Spirit meets us like this when we come to the end of ourselves, there is one place we perceive it more clearly than anywhere else: in our gifts. When we are really working within them.
Paul writes about the gifts of the Spirit to the church in Corinth. He runs through a list: wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, the working of miracles, prophecy, the discernment of spirits, tongues and their interpretation; there are more, of course, but in Corinth at that moment, those were the ones that mattered. The point he is making in the letter is that no one has all of them. The gifts your neighbour has been given are probably not the same as yours; that is good, because the Church needs them all across many bodies. Thus, we are each given particular things to do, and we all have our particular ways of doing them.
The focus of Paul’s message is often on the list which Paul provides, and it can be easy to gloss over how he concludes his message: “All these are inspired/activated by one and the same Spirit.”
In his book The Sanctifier, Archbishop of Mexico Luis Martínez offers an image of what this activation looks like. He writes, “Let us imagine a great artist creating a masterpiece. He arranges for the preparation of the canvas and the way in which the colours are to be combined. He then calls on his best pupils to share the work. He permits them to do the least important or least perfect part of it. But when he comes to the delicate, finest parts where he will reveal his genius, where the inspiration will be crystallized, then the pupils put down their brushes and the master takes over.”[1]
If we think about how a painting is actually made, one does not begin with the light on the water or variations of green in the leaves. Nor do we start out with the more refined elements of our gifts.
One begins with big shapes: the horizon line, the clump of the trees on the left, the path the river takes through the field. That is the work of the pupils, good and real work. However, we, in our humanity, can only ever take it so far. The finest, most perfect touches are always those of the master.
A temptation in this moment is to treat that limitation as the gift running out or our own failure to be ready for the moment. But that limit is not the failing of the gift at all. Laying down those big shapes is what brings the painting to the point where the master’s hand is required. The pupil who works to the edge of her skill has not fallen short; she has faithfully carried the work as far as it was hers to carry.
Jesus makes something like a promise about this. Warning his disciples what to expect when they are hauled before synagogues, rulers, and authorities, He tells them, “And when they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and the authorities, do not be anxious how or what you are to answer or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.”[2]
That may be the shape of the promise to the disciples in that moment, but it is certainly not always the way it works, and anyone who has lived very long knows it. The Spirit’s work is not always the words we want or would have chosen. Sometimes the thing to do is simply to stay, sit, and not speak but to pray in the silence of our hearts. Or sometimes it seems like the Spirit is not at work at all.
When that happens—and it will happen—it’s easy to pretend that the Spirit was not at work. Of that, too, we must be wary. There are seasons when nothing seems to be given that we can recognize as help, and we are left to keep working for what seems like no good reason at all. When that happens, we must remember that the Spirit is always at work in us, whether we feel it in any given moment or not.
There is something in all of this that warrants reflection. The whole image of the brush set down, the work leaving our hands, the Spirit taking over can sound less like a gift and more like a loss. The world, after all, teaches us to hold on to ourselves: our judgment, our agency, our right to author our own lives, successes and failures alike.
The promise of the Spirit, however, seems to be implying that for the “really good stuff” to happen, we have to work to the point of our own failure and hand it off precisely so that someone else can get the Glory.
But that handover is not a disappearance. The pupil does not vanish when the master takes the brush; the painting is still, in part, hers. We are not overwritten by the Spirit’s working through us; we are, in fact, most ourselves in the Spirit, in Christ, when that happens. It is in our giving over, not our holding on, that we embody in our identity as Christians—as ones who act by the will of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the fullest sense. We empty ourselves so that the Light of God may fill us and shine through us.
There is one more place where we must take some care. It’s easy to think that, like the painting, our gifts and our lives in Christ are brought slowly to completion, layer by detail, and that can make it sound as though we are working our way toward something we do not yet have, a salvation that still lies somewhere ahead of us. That is not the Gospel.
Fleming Rutledge, when speaking about being transformed by the work of God, puts it plainly. Our “right-making, or rectification, is not a process. It is already true in Christ… in the power of the Spirit, there is an ‘already’ quality about this proclamation… It really is quite true to say that the Gospel tells us, ‘Become what you already are.’”[3] (The Crucifixion, 555)
That means that the painting is already finished and perfect in Christ. His refining of our gifts and lives is not a labour towards an earned salvation. It is the work of becoming more of who we already are—the good work of living into the identity that is already, in Christ, our own.
This is our identity in Christ, in the Spirit; The Master taking up the brush, working in and through us far more than we could ever have asked or imagined.
[1] Luis Martinez, The Sanctifier (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul Press, 1982), 120.
[2] Luke 12:11-12 (RSV).
[3] Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans Publishing, 2015), 555.
