None of us likes to admit that we do not know something, whether it's how to reverse park or how the world economy works. We live in a world of people who seek to demonstrate just how well they understand everything and can manage. The Holy Spirit for me is that part of God which demonstrates that not everything is predictable, knowable or manageable. The Holy Spirit has a glorious, dangerous, unworldly unpredictability.

The Holy Spirit is featuring strongly in our lectionary at the moment. With the winds of Pentecost blowing at our heels and Trinity Sunday, pulpits across the diocese might well be welcoming balloons, shamrocks, ice and steaming kettles and all kinds of symbols to help us understand who this Holy Spirit is and how the Holy Spirit is connected to Father and Son.

It's not inappropriate that the Holy Spirit is someone (or something?) which is hard to pin down; something of which we can see the effects if not the Holy Spirit itself, like electricity, magnetism or even Dark Matter. In a climate of scientific endeavour the church can sometimes seem embarrassed about the mysterious elements of our faith. When the world seeks for concrete fact for its truth, how can those that believe in an unfathomable Three in One God not be seen as naive or foolish? Yet how much can those that value all this knowledge truly understand and explain? Is there more to wisdom than mere knowledge?

The human mind is a complex and wonderful creation which is built for exploration and learning. It does mean that we should do so knowing that we shall never know everything about the world, about the people around us, even about ourselves. Christians however have a relationship with a God who does know, a God whose Holy Spirit was there from the beginning, whether the world began with a bang or with a whisper.

The writer of Genesis may not have possessed all the scientific knowledge that people do now about the beginning of life but that writer understood the deep truth of life. Genesis tells this in story not in fact but in Spirit. Those that try to make faith seem foolish, pick on the facts, the tangible things, the inaccuracies or inconsistencies of our faith story. The Holy Spirit's focus is not on those things. The Holy Spirit guides us to focus not on the words but on the story; on what the story is about not what it says. One of my favourite parts of our faith story is the Book of Job. In it we join in a discussion about the nature of suffering and the world between Job, a man of incredible faith, and his friends who offer their various takes on it all. Two things are dear to my heart about this story. Firstly, when God responds to the men it is to demonstrate how little these so called wise men know about it all, asking:

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements-surely you know!" Job 38.4-5

Most poignantly though, of those friends of Job, the one who truly shows wisdom, rather than knowledge, is the youngest, Elihu who says:

‘I am young in years,
and you are aged;
Therefore I was timid and afraid
to declare my opinion to you.
I said, "Let days speak,
and many years teach wisdom."
But truly it is the spirit in a mortal,
the breath of the Almighty, that makes for understanding.
It is not the old that are wise,
nor the aged that understand what is right. (Job 32.6-9)

So often, we ourselves get caught up in the science of the world and it is the young among us who see the wisdom. It is the young who can speak Holy Spirit wisdom. How are we equipping our young to gain that wisdom and speak it? How are we listening to the voice of youth in others and ourselves? How are we focusing not on the words but on the story of our faith?

Sarah Brush
Diocesan Youth Officer