In a book
co-authored with a psychologist, Tony Kelly, a Catholic theologian who had one
time was President of the Australian Catholic Theological Association, wrote
the following insightful note about the fruits of the Spirit, much of which
Latter-day Saints and others will also find of worth:
Fruits of
the Spirit
There are at least four ways in which the
symbol of the Spirit functions in Christian experience . . . First, in the
Christian consciousness of the gift of God, the Spirit comes to overcome the
inertia of the past – or better, of a present trying to establish its security
by privileging the past as the paradigmatic golden age. The gift of the Holy
Breath works against a version of ultimate reality in terms of repetition of
what has been. As breaking the binding power of the past, the Spirit impels the
believer into the possibilities of the future. It does not permit any return to
an untroubled existence. In New Testament terms, it occasions scandal, by
guiding Peter to the house of the pagan Cornelius (Acts 11). It surprises the
early community with the unsettling gift of the former persecutor, Paul (Acts
9:13-15). It is the advantage that comes upon the departure of the earthly
Jesus (Jn 16:7). It leads to a knowledge of things that before could not be
borne (Jn 16:12-13). The symbol of the Spirit functions in opening the
religious imagination to the radically, the imaginably, new.
Secondly, the symbol of the Spirit counters
both the pathologies of legalism and irresponsibility. For the Spirit inspires
genuine liberty (2 Cor 3:17). Whilst there is evidence of a joyous expansion of
the human spirit, this is far from licentious self-indulgence. Genuine liberty
is marked by the exigence of self-giving and self-sacrifice (Gal 5:16-25). The
Spirit leads to a liberty which breaks the dreary security of legalism yet
accepts the social necessity of law and structure for a responsible social
existence (Cf. 1 Cor 8:8-10; 10:23-25; 14:26-33). The Spirit allows God to be
God, beyond the idolatry of legalism or the demonic excesses of licentiousness.
Once more the symbol of the Spirit creates a space for Christian liberty
between the alternatives of an idolisation of law, and the demonization of
liberty.
Thirdly, whilst the Spirit is associated with
unity, the unity of the Spirit is not an immersion into some form of undifferentiated
infantile symbiosis. Nor does it entail monochrome uniformity. The Spirit
stands for and inspires unity-in-difference, by animating a community of
distinct persons (1 Cor 12:12-30). As the coming of the Holy Spirit enables
communication in the different languages of Pentecost (Acts 2:5-12), it is a
space of unity revealed in a variety of gifts for the achievement of the common
good (1 Cor 12:7), in the one Body of Christ with its different members. While
the unity of the Spirit abolishes differences in race, religion, social status
and gender, it does this only as much as such differences cause unredeemed
isolation and aggression. It does not preclude the potential of such
differences to be gifts in the one body of believers. In short, the Spirit is
the symbol of gift of a self-transcending unity-in-difference.
Fourthly, the symbol of the Spirit counters
the pathology of a false transcendence. In contrast to the dis-incarnate
spiritual realm of religious individualism, the Spirit works in the earthly
reality of history, in all the conflicts, challenges and opportunities to be
encountered therein. In doing this, the gift of the Spirit inspires genuine
faith with the ‘dangerous memory’ of the crucified Jesus. In the way of the
cross, genuine spirituality is not a socially irresponsible religiosity, but a
matter of entering into the compassion of Christ for the poor and the
suffering. Such a spiritually demands solidarity with Christ and his suffering
members. Without a discerning responsibility to the meanings and values
inherent in Christian tradition – above all, to the word and example of Jesus –
the symbolic meaning of the Spirit is vitiated (Rom 8:11; Jn 14:26; 1 Jn
2:22-25). Here the Spirit-symbol stands for the space in which history can
occur, with its fidelity to the past and openness to the future. (Frances Moran and Tony Kelly, Search for
the Soul: Psychological and Theological Reflections on Spiritual Growth [Strathfield,
Australia: 1999], 132-34)
