What is the power of belief?  I wonder if our understanding of belief suffers from the doldrums of simply reciting creeds and doctrinal statements that serve to define or identify what we consider faith or belief.  Here, belief can very well become the utterance of statements wielded when necessary, e.g., in liturgical settings or defending our beliefs against another perceived opposite belief.  Understanding of belief, then becomes almost a device or an external tool that we occasionally use for the handiwork of church gatherings and social and religious dialogue or skirmishes, which sometimes escalate to warfare.  To understand the belief becomes a very utilitarian venture with little to no transformative value for the individual much less the community. 

The Hindu/Catholic mystic, Raimon Panikkar tells us that “to understand is not just to get the meaning but to stand-under the spell of the ‘thing’ so understood.”[i]  The meaning of a belief becomes harmless when it doesn’t hold you under its spell, so to speak.  Belief here can be seen as an action or an experience that touches us at the core of our being in such a way that we have no other recourse than to resound, reverberate, live and expand.[ii]

In the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 19:1-8), Paul encounters some disciples on the way to Ephesus, and questions them as to whether or not they received the Holy Spirit when they became ‘believers.’  They reply to Paul that they had never heard of the Holy Spirit, but had received the baptism of repentance from John the Baptist.  Paul then lays hands on them and they receive the Holy Spirit, with the immediate result being that they begin to speak in tongues and prophesy.

I don’t think Paul is trying to undermine the work of John the Baptist here, so much as stressing the importance of the inescapable dynamism that comes with belief when it is experienced within the context of the Holy (Whole) Spirit.  The gift of Wholeness that is received by the Holy Spirit is demanding, invigorating and enlivening. 

So what is this wholeness about?  It seems to be about constantly widening the perspective of our lives that can or that we will allow to be touched by the Christ event.  How far are we willing to go within and out towards others to incarnate, i.e., share, the Risen Christ?  To believe in the gospel, or the Risen Christ, is to be and to live in the Wholeness of the Holy Spirit of Christ by welcoming it and sharing it in every moment of encounter, which if we go deeper and broader, tends to become every moment of our lives.

John’s gospel (JN 16: 29-33), speaks of the cost of this type of belief, when Jesus confronts his disciples, who all the sudden claim to have ‘gotten it.’  After claiming that they ‘believe’ that Jesus came from God because they sense they understand what Jesus is talking about now, Jesus answers these disciples:

Do you believe now?
Behold, the hour is coming and has arrived
when each of you will be scattered to his own home
and you will leave me alone.
But I am not alone, because the Father is with me.

Jesus’ tone here is a bit challenging to say the least.  I don’t think he is trying to discourage the disciples as much as providing a reality check as to what this belief will mean for them if they honestly engage it.  Lest we forget the cross, which by the way is ours together, the time will come and indeed is probably already here that simply talking about the good news will grow stale and/or cost us something.  We will either have to face up to the incumbent responsibilities of receiving the Spirit of Christ, or we will deny it.  And this denying may take the form of defensive doctrinal debates with those whom we cannot admit because of their different beliefs or even relegating belief to Church on Sunday attitudes.  In any case, we are perhaps unknowingly attempting to ‘leave Christ alone.’

In the alternative, if we engage the dynamism of the Wholeness of a Life in Christ, if we ‘receive the Holy Spirit,’ we will also feel alone at times.  We will have to work within ourselves, and in the process we will ‘be scattered in our own home.’  For some reason, this is the necessary process in following Christ and engaging the Holy Spirit.  We have to learn to receive the Whole Spirit of Christ, and this takes humility, surrender and most of all Love.  Eventually, if we allow it, it will take over our WHOLE life.  But isn’t that kind of the point?

We many times feel that we have to stand up for our beliefs.  But I wonder if we truly exhaust all the ways that that can be done.  Following Panikkar, perhaps we can do best by ‘standing-under’ the spell of what it means – in this particular case – to be a disciple.  This is not a spell in the sense wherein we follow a pied piper, but rather the spell of wonder over the Wholeness of Divine Incarnation all around us.  If we humbly stand-under our beliefs rather than many times forcing our understanding on others defensively, I wonder if God could not even work within that for the transformation of the world.  This would be belief in action, belief as action.

I have told you this so that you might have peace in me.
In the world you will have trouble,
but take courage, I have conquered the world.

Here, Jesus is now encouraging the disciples to do the hard work, which involves the wholeness and entirety of their lives, which belongs not to them but to God.  When He says, “I have conquered the world,” I think he is extending to them and to us the en-couragement (whole-heartedness) of trusting that His very Spirit, the (W)Holy Spirit of the Divine has not destroyed or rejected the ‘world,’ but overcome the world by coming over and in to us so that the Newness of Life can permeate all. 

No one can ever really be alone in the Whole Spirit of God, but we can certainly make each other feel such when we resist the Spirit of the Whole.  Just look around you.  In the new world that we live in on account of the pandemic, I wonder how we could create new ways to really believe in the Holy Spirit as the Whole Spirit of God.  How can the wholeness of our believing truly begin to embody our lives shared with one another in and as Christ?   As we discover this, we will have no other recourse than to, as Panikkar tells us, resound, reverberate, live and expand the wholeness and fullness of Christ.

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[i] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity (Orbis: 2010), p. 266

[ii] Ibid.

(originally posted June 3, 2020)