The talk of Dr Jessie Rogers presented during the UISG event "Deepening the Plenary", which took place from May 3-5 2023.

The Holy Spirit is present in the life of the individual believer and in the Church. When we receive the Holy Spirit in baptism we are incorporated into the body of Christ. The Spirit at work in the Church empowers her to be a catalyst, to act as the leaven of God’s salvific work in the world. In a way that is hard to put into words, we are the actualisation of Christ’s body in particular times and places, called and equipped to be a channel of divine blessing to the world. Little wonder that St Paul reacted with such annoyance to divisions and factions within the churches to which he wrote! As members of Christ’s body, we are being drawn into a community in the Spirit that transcends differences and divisions. Our fundamental vocation is to enter more deeply into the mystery of the divine life. We are to bear witness, through the transformation of our own lives and communities, to the power of God at work in the world to bring about the blessed future toward which the Spirit is drawing the whole of creation. Our experience of Christian community now should be a foretaste of salvation that fills us with hope for the future of the cosmos.

In our own lives, we experience the consolation of the Holy Spirit, transformative power at work to draw us toward Christlikeness. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us (Romans 8:11). Surely that makes a difference to our present possibilities and not only to our future hope. The Holy Spirit is at work in the baptised, in the Church and in creation. There is a coherence, a seamlessness to this work. We can identify the fingerprints of the Spirit wherever there is a deepening of life-giving connection, wherever community flourishes and communion is deepened.

We cannot ignore that there is also a pull toward disintegration and alienation. We can name it in many ways – the evil one, sin, ‘the cosmic powers of this present darkness [and] the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’ (Ephesians 6:12) It exists in all attempts at domination through violence and coercion, in every contemptuous dismissal of any of God’s creatures, and in every destructive impulse. It is an insidious companion to religious zeal that holds to a form of truth that hardens the heart and shatters communion. The Preparatory Document for the first phase of the Synod on Synodality warns against an unseen actor that promotes ‘forms of religious rigor, or moral injunction that presents itself as more demanding than that of Jesus, and of the seduction of a worldly political wisdom that claims to be more effective than a discernment of spirits.’ Spiritual wisdom requires that we discern the movements toward or away from God so that we know what to say ‘yes’ and what to say ‘no’ to.