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9 Calling on the Holy Spirit The Integrity and the Travail of Nature In the words of the popular gospel song, we’ve come this far by faith. In part 1, we considered the journey before us as well as what it can mean to scythe with God, to practice the Trinity Prayer, and to face the eclipse of God with a fragile faith. In part 2, I invited you to ponder with me the meanings of this petition of the Trinity Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. I asked you, in particular, to consider the revelation of God in these twilight times and the light of Christ in our midst, and then to reflect about the ambiguous case of one who prays to Jesus. That then led us, in part 3, to the stance of praise: to engage some meanings of the acclamation Praise Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In those chapters, we explored the experience of contemplating the triune God in Godself, the presence of this God in, with, and under all things, and the cosmic ministries of the two hands of the same God: Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. As we now enter part 3, and the final chapters of these explorations, we move from the spiritual stance of praise back to the spiritual stance with which we first began our consideration of the Trinity Prayer itself, petition, in the strict sense of that word, letting our “requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6). We do so with these words before us: Come Holy Spirit, come and reign. I am not sure when this petition first dawned on me as a fitting conclusion for the Christian mantra that I had for some years been thinking of as the Trinity Prayer. Petitions calling the Holy Spirit to come were quite familiar to me from my younger years, such as Luther’s great hymn, “Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord.” But such calls to the Spirit almost without exception focused on the believer’s life or the life of the church more generally, not on the whole created world. As Luther wrote in that hymn: “Come Holy Ghost, God and Lord, / With all your graces now outpoured / On each believer’s mind and 187 heart; / Your fervent love to them impart.”1 To my knowledge, only rarely have the church’s hymns accented the cosmic ministry of the Spirit.2 A 1978 hymn by James K. Manley addressing the Spirit is a notable exception: “You moved on the waters, / you called to the deep, / then you coaxed up the mountains / from the valleys of sleep; / and over the eons / you called to each thing;/ ‘Awake from your slumbers/ and rise on your wings.’”3 Coming to Know the Cosmic Spirit I myself had been an unconscious heir of that tradition of Western Christian theology and spirituality that in accent had focused on the individual believer or the Christian community as the primary milieu of the Spirit’s ministry, as Luther did in his hymn “Come Holy Ghost, God and Lord.” I have already discussed the theological and spiritual eclipse of the Spirit in the Christian West more generally. Here, I want to recall how I made the transition from that kind of focus on the believer and the community of believers to understand the Spirit more universally, more cosmically. When I now pray “Come Holy Spirit, come and reign,” I am envisioning the Spirit coming to all creatures, moving on the waters, calling to the deep, coaxing up the mountains, calling to each thing. I have only recently come to realize how in fact I moved—or was moved—from the narrow and, if the truth be spoken, anthropocentric focus on the Spirit that I had inherited in the middle years of the past century to the cosmic vision that I now wholeheartedly espouse. In retrospect, I think that there were two spiritual factors that influenced me the most in this respect. The first was my longstanding intuition, predicated on my own experience of God in nature, that God has God’s own purposes with the world of nature as well as with the world of human history. I had taken it for granted, ever since I began to think about such things, that nature has its own meaning in the greater scheme of things, that it is not just a platform put in place by God so that God could have a history...

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