God in a Box?

In the gospel of John, we are told that the Holy Ghost moves around "like the wind" and cannot be predicted. I have seen the truth of this many times and in many ways. A priest once told me the funny story of receiving a number of compliments about his homily after Mass one day. Then one of the last parishioners to leave came over and said he waited because he did not want anyone else to hear what he was saying. He told the priest that the homily was really bad, and that he wanted to let the priest know that he would be praying for him to do better next time (!).

Just because one person likes or dislikes a particular homily, does not mean that he or she is right or wrong. We each can be moved by the Holy Ghost in different ways and at different times. When He effects one person does not have any influence on when He will do something for anyone else (just like the wind). The Spirit of God has power beyond our understanding, and He does not move in accord with any of our plans or expectations.

The Holy Spirit can make one person hear exactly what he needs from a homily, and the person sitting right next to him might not get anything out of the same homily. Why is this so? This is not from a failure of the Spirit, but usually from a resistance of the person. The Holy Spirit never fails, but we often resist. This applies to far more than homilies. It applies to all the ways that He works in our lives; in our prayers, our reading of the Scriptures, everything. He knows what each of us needs and what is best for each of us, and that is why He adapts His work to us individually.

A homily you hear may not be the best homily ever (no priest is perfect--they can all give a bad homily), but that does not mean that it is necessarily a bad homily; someone else may have very well been impacted greatly by it. It all depends on the work of the Spirit in each of your lives. The same goes for a book that you might read, or any other spiritual devotion or discipline.

There are some people who, like the ancient Pharisees, cannot see anything as possibly correct if it is any different than their own way of doing things. They look upon anything different as being "weird" or "crazy" because they are too narrow minded to understand that the Holy Ghost does not work within the bounds of their limited knowledge. Most people are not that far along on the path to apostasy, but every one of us should ask ourselves whether we have fallen to this same error in some way. Can we see beyond our own experience? Do we accept the fact that the Spirit of God works in mysterious ways, and works differently with each of us? Or, have we decided that we know the only right way, and thus have put bounds of the work of God?

Let us each acknowledge that the Holy Ghost works in ways far more diverse than any of us can know, and let us be sure never to presume that we have all the answers. Trying to put God in a box is a very dangerous mistake.