My son Henry sat opposite me in our living room, trying to cross off a confirmation-related assignment on his to-do list: an interview with a parent about their spiritual life and journey. “When have you felt closest to the Holy Spirit?” he asked.
The question took me back to the day I was confirmed, several decades ago. After a bishop’s thumb marked an oil cross on my forehead, I returned to my pew. When I knelt, my vision went fuzzy and flecked, and my heart felt like it was filling twice as much space in my chest. It could be that I just had low blood sugar. It was dimly lit in church, with all those flickering candles, so maybe that’s what affected my vision. Or maybe I was tired, flushed, hormonal, borderline vasovagal. It felt spiritual, however, not only physiological. I was supernaturally calm and felt closer to God than I’d ever felt to anyone, like we were one, the same.
I don’t know what caused it. I never told anyone about it. And I’ve longed ever since to have another experience like it.
It’s not always clear when a feeling is just a feeling, and when it’s a spiritual sign. The Holy Spirit is evasive, elusive. The lines blur. Rarely has God’s presence been obvious in my life—and I’m not alone. A colleague once shared that the most difficult question she wrestles with in her faith is why it’s so hard to hear God’s voice—and why some people never find it.
Even the saints had times when they were uncertain of God’s presence with them. St. Teresa of Calcutta lived half a century of spiritual desolation, sensing God’s absence and “untold darkness.” St. John of the Cross wrote that “the endurance of darkness is preparation for great light.” St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Faustina, and others all reported periods of darkness and desolation.
This is the journey my son Henry is embarking on now, as a 13-year-old proclaiming his faith in a higher power. A dark and thorny path lies ahead, riddled with doubt and suffering.
And yet we’re invited to believe, even when we can’t see. In the second line of the Bible, we’re told that before the Earth had form, the Spirit of God was there, hovering in the darkness. Throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the Spirit is still there, breathing new life; descending like a dove; empowering with gifts, skill, wisdom, strength; blowing like the wind; and equipping people in a torrent of language to proclaim and clear a path to conversion.
The second chapter of Acts tells us: “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability” (vss. 2–4).
At Henry’s confirmation retreat early this year, one of his teachers shared that at times, she has experienced a particular stirring in her chest, heat rising in her torso—signs she attributed to the Holy Spirit trying to get her attention. “When something moves your heart,” she said, “when something makes your heart burn and washes over you, stop and take it seriously. Listen.”
When Henry asked me that day when I’d felt closest to the Holy Spirit, I told him I’d had what I thought might have been a “holy experience” in eighth grade and briefly described those moments on my confirmation day. He scratched a note on his paper, half an eye on the page and half on his phone. He moved to the next question, but I kept talking.
I told him believing in God wasn’t always easy for me. I told him there were long stretches of spiritual drought since my devoted days as a 13-year-old—and even then, faith had been challenging. I’d been depressed as an adolescent, trying to feel at home in who I was; I’d been spiritually estranged in college at a Catholic university where I felt peripheral to most of the student body. In my 20s, I cut the cord with Catholicism and with God, until I met the man who would become my husband. Over a period of years, he went through the process of ultimately converting to Catholicism, and as his relationship with his faith deepened alongside our relationship, I was drawn back into an exercise of questioning and seeking.
Ever since I was Henry’s age, I have wanted, more than anything, to again feel the spiritual wholeness I felt the day of my confirmation. I have never stopped wanting my heart to burn or tongues of fire to descend on me. I yearn to hear that “still small voice” or be able to identify which of my heart’s stirrings are merely feelings and which are the Spirit. I’d welcome proof of concept: clear, consistent signs of God’s presence. Sometimes, even now when I go to church, I stare at the altar and try to relax my eyes, and sometimes, things will go just out of focus, the candles and the gold of the altar will fizzle and smear, and I’ll think I am almost there: to feeling that loved, that held…
In many ways, that desire—to find God in every feeling, to receive clear, overt signs—is a leftover hallmark of my adolescent faith: my Thomas self, wanting to press my fingers into the holes in Jesus’ hands. What I’ve come to understand, though, is that even in humanity’s brokenness and uncertainty, even in our own personal periods of discord and doubt, when we don’t hear the Spirit, when we don’t feel it, the Spirit is stillthere, steady as she goes. We are loved. That’s the true reality—and faith is the practice of not questioning that reality, simply believing it.
As I answered Henry’s question that day, I most wanted to convey that my truest prayer for him is to know this: that he’s always loved, and he’ll never be alone. I want that to be the overt, defining given of his life, even in the absence of any driving winds or tongues of fire, so that he always feels free to be exactly who God made him to be, without fear, insecurity, or shame.
The Holy Spirit could find him in a shared look with a stranger or in a perfectly timed double rainbow. It could be in random life circumstances colliding or in an encounter with an unlikely person—a foster child, an unhoused person on a street corner—temporarily granting him new eyes, making his heart burn with clarity, erasing in a moment the doubt of so many barren stretches of life, and reminding him that he’s seen, heard, held.
Like so much about God, the Holy Spirit is a mystery not for us to solve: a spiritual homecoming, a stirring heart, a veil of warmth, a still small voice. It’s a surprise encounter: a stranger, a child, a friend, a foe. It’s an invitation, a relationship: a teacher sharing, a son questioning, a mother reaching out. It is the constant loving Presence, hovering in the darkness, eternally reaching back.
Like Henry and his fellow confirmands and like the apostles on Pentecost, we’re not meant to analyze and examine every sign and stirring we feel. We’re invited to gather together, open to receiving gifts that guide us toward new life—to take the hovering presence, the fiery heart, the Spirit all around us, and manifest it in our own unwavering love for one another.
Image: Unsplash/Courtney Kirkland
