How can we get to know the Holy Spirit — and what pronoun should we use?

Pinnock likewise picks up on the theme of the Spirit's seeming elusiveness and how we must adjust our outlook and attunement. "For all theological topics, Spirit is one of the most elusive. Knowing the Spirit is experiential, and the topic is oriented toward transformation more than information."

That the knowledge of God as Spirit is experiential may be one of the sources of resistance many have when it comes to reflecting on, praying to or even remembering the Holy Spirit. Western Christian practices and conversation often centers on the intellectualization of faith rather than the embodied, corporeal, sacramental reality that must be experienced and lived out.

Likewise, that the Spirit draws close to us in our own imperfection, creatureliness and messiness—as the ruach Elohim ("breath/spirit of God") does with the tohu wavohu (chaos, disorder, void) of creation in opening verses of Genesis — can be something that makes some Christians uncomfortable. If one's image of God is static, immutable, impassible, then the idea that God not only draws close but indwells in us and the rest of creation can be unsettling.

This is also a reason why so many Christians may be closet believers in Docetism, a heresy that claims that Jesus of Nazareth was not actually fully human but only fully divine, appearing or pretending to be human during his life, ministry and death. In both cases — what we might call "Holy Spirit atheism" and Christological Docetism — such Christians want a God that conforms to their ideas of what constitutes divinity and not the actual God who reveals Godself in the Word made flesh and the word of Scripture inspired by the Spirit.

But the Holy Spirit defies much of our preconceived notions of God. The Spirit is dynamic, unpredictable, immediate, creative, empowering and life-giving. This last point is emphasized by theologian and St. Joseph Sr. Elizabeth Johnson.

"In the words of the Nicene Creed, the Spirit is vivificantem, vivifier or life-giver. This designation refers to creation not just at the beginning of time but continuously: the Spirit is the unceasing, dynamic flow of divine power that sustains the universe, bringing forth life," Johnson said in the 1993 Madeleva Lecture.

The Holy Spirit is, indeed, the source of all life and the one who "renews the face of the earth" (Psalm 104). When we come to recognize that the Holy Spirit is pure gift, as St. Augustine makes clear again and again in his classic treatise De Trinitate, we can begin to let go of our willful ignorance of God's vivifying power and presence in our lives, while also embracing the truth of God's nearness.

With this in mind, we may begin to recognize the activity of God's Spirit in our lives and the world around us through our experience. Finite and imperfect as each of us are, we all have the capacity for recognizing the gift of divine presence among us. We just need to attune ourselves to the Spirit's presence. Each breath we take, every experience of love we encounter, our very existence as part of a radically contingent creation — these are just a sampling of the ordinary moments in which the indwelling presence of God as Spirit can be recognized when we are attentive to the movement of divine love in our experience of the world.

I also want to say a word about divine pronouns. How should we refer to the Holy Spirit?

Let it be stipulated that God is beyond any concept of creaturely sex and gender. As a matter of theological truth, we must all agree to that. However, despite the orthodox claim that God is neither male nor female and that whatever gendered language one invokes in reference to God will always fall short, it is striking how upset, threatened and defensive some people get at the suggestion that we could (and should) also use feminine language for God.

While there are plenty of theological and scriptural reasons why God the Creator can be referred to by either male or female pronouns, and despite the near ubiquity of masculine references such as Father and the historical person Jesus of Nazareth that provides a strong rationale for male references to the eternal word, I am among the many theologians in the Western and Eastern churches who embrace "she" as an appropriate reference to the Holy Spirit.

This is supported by longstanding traditions that goes back to the Hebrew and Syriac words for the Spirit, as well as the theological reflections of early Eastern and Western theologians. As Congar noted, "there is no lack of feminine characteristics in the God of biblical revelation, and these are emphasized by the vocabulary of Scripture itself." And Johnson has made some of the most clear and compelling arguments in this regard in her now-classic She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse.

There is not enough space here to rehearse the dozens of great Christian saints and mystics who throughout history have used feminine imagery to describe God generally and the Spirit specifically. Suffice it to say that my choice to refer occasionally to the Holy Spirit as She is grounded in orthodox, scriptural, theological reasoning. Such pronoun usage also helps us recall that God cannot be reduced to one gender or category but is the source of and relates to all life, gender expressions, creaturely experience and diverse realities in this world.