The Fire of the Holy Spirit

So, recently I have been contemplating the meaning of "righteous anger" - its foundations in the Bible, its use, its purpose, its meaning, etc... It is a confusing topic!! It is something that is not often highlighted about God, because He is all-loving and and all-forgiving, but there is a side to His love that is fiercely protective of His beloved!!!

Take the story of the flight from Egypt that we heard the other day as a reading at Mass. Moses was leading the Israelites out of Egypt, and God led them through the Red Sea - PARTED the Sea for them!! - and KILLED all the Egyptians by causing the Sea to CRASH IN ON THEM! This is a God of strength, conviction, and FIERCE love. This is a God reminiscent of a mother bear, protecting her cubs at ALL costs from their enemies.

We need only to think of the Holy Spirit - the FIRE of God's love - in order to understand this concept more fully. What is fire? It has the potential to be either extremely destructive or extremely helpful. It can be the hearth fire that warms the house, cooks the meals, and sterilizes the water for drinking, or it can be the conflagration that wipes out a forest, that destroys the village, that makes dust and ashes of what was once solid - reduces it back to its very creation!!! That is QUITE the contrast!

Even Mary, meek and mild, God's most beautiful creation, has a professed and dedicated hatred of Satan. Genesis 3:15 declared that there would be "enmity" between "the woman" (Mary, the new Eve) and the snake (Satan), and between her seed (her children) and his seed (his followers). This is a STRONG statement!! The children of Mary, who are the children of God, are to have HATRED for Satan's followers - but what does this mean, and how does it manifest itself? Often, we see the positive side of this relationship, meaning that we experience a closeness to Mary (as illustrated here is amazingly cute detail: http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Roman%20Catholicism/baby_worships_mary.gif :) ), but when we are confronted by Satan, our polar opposite, our professed and hated enemy, what happens?

Well, let's consider the facts. Satan is always depicted as a snake underneath Mary's foot, and Mary is always stepping on him. It always appeared to me as a child that it was a ginger step, that she had control over him and was simply constricting his movement. But Mary's hatred for Satan logically would cause a more dramatic action than a simple step. It is a CRUSHING step, a step of ENMITY. The New International Version of Genesis 3:15 says that "[The woman] will crush your head, and you will strike [the woman's] heel." CRUSH - not maim, not injure, but CRUSH.

Satan will strike at your heel - your achilles' heel, that is. Whatever it may be. Sex, drugs, rock n'roll, whatever. And Mary will forever have enmity for him, she will HATE him enspirited with the passion and fire of the Holy Spirit forever - and we are called to do the same.

It is important to remember, however, is the fact that the REASON why there is such enmity between Mary and Satan is because of her humility, her ultimate dependence on God's Will. It is where her strength is founded, and where Satan falls, because he is pride in its most concentrated form.

So, what does this mean for us? It means, to quote Dylan Thomas, "rage, rage against the dying of the light." Righteous anger is not originated in self, but rather in the Holy Spirit. It is an outrage at offenses against which is good and holy, like Jesus' outburst in the temple where he overturned the tables of the moneychangers (Matthew 21:12-13). It is NOT self-seeking, it is in total accordance with every rule of love set forth in 1 Corinthians 13. Yet, it takes into account that we are IN this world but not OF it, it takes into account that our love of God trumps our love of man and love of this earth EVERY TIME, WITHOUT QUESTION. In essence, Jesus demonstrated the same fierce love of God that God demonstrated with the Israelites - Jesus' destructive love was a love that explained how God could "tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days." It was a love that went beyond the "niceness" typically associated with sugar-sweet love in our culture - the kind you link to candy hearts and saccharine sentiments. It was REAL love, TRUE love, FIERCE love. The love of a mother for her son, the love of a man for Christ, His Savior, and for God, His Creator.

Let us all pray for the Fire of the Holy Spirit, that we might have as fierce a love of God as Jesus, His only Son. Let us pray that we might be instilled with the courage of this Fire and the sword of God's Word as our armaments against Satan, and that we might be protected by the shield of Mary, clothing ourselves in her humility over our own sinful nature!!

Caritas ferus ad Christi per Mariam,
Christina :)