Hopefully I'll show how some of Aquinas' high theology of the Holy Spirit, his vision of the Holy Spirit is love,

really allows us to understand what the place of praying to the Holy Spirit is in our lives,

and how the Holy Spirit is really our greatest companion and friend in our spiritual life.

I mean, I think if it's one idea I hope you come away with from the weekend, in terms of your practical prayer and thinking, it's to sensitize ourselves the idea that the Holy Spirit is personally inviting us to friendship. And it's a peculiar kind of friendship, a little different than that with Christ. The Holy Spirit is more discreet and less discernible, but nevertheless very present.

So in this first conference, really I just want to explore, you might say,

the fundamental confession of the faith, I believe in the Holy Spirit, which we say maybe more or less

mindlessly in the creed every Sunday, I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life.

When we call him Lord, of course we're confessing the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

And the order I'm going to just take things through in the next, I think, 45 minutes or so with a little time for questions afterwards, is to think about kind of the historical order.

I'm going to go through and say, well, what's the reason, the root of the confession of the faith of the Holy Spirit biblically?

How did the early fathers, at least some of them, argue that the Holy Spirit

must be considered God? I mean, what's at stake in the question? Why did the early intelligentsia

of the church sort of say, listen, we need to confess the divinity of Christ and put it in the

creed in 381 at the First Council of Constantinople.

And then look a little bit at Thomas Aquinas' kind of mature theology of the Holy Spirit as a person

who is love. And what does that mean? That's such as, you know, that word L-O-V-E is so

colored for us with all kinds of connotations from I Love Chocolate Cake to

any kind of Jane Austen romance to high notions and sacrifice.

But when we talk about the Holy Spirit is love, what is really the trajectory of our thinking

there, to think about a transcendent mystery of love and God being love.

Okay, so the handout I've given you is a handout which will potentially accompany you

if you persevere through all four of the talks I'm going to give you.

...