Throughout my years of spiritual study, I've often read about and heard others speak of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Holy Trinity—God (or Father), Son, and Holy Ghost. My own concept of the Trinity came mostly from Christian friends who would liken it to an egg—God being the shell, the Holy Spirit being the whites, and the Son being the yolk. Most of the ideas I'd heard left me feeling as though the Holy Ghost was an appendix of God, some extraneous thing that floated somewhere far away in space. As a Christian Scientist, the concept of God as Father-Mother and of Christ as the spiritual idea of sonship had been clear and significant to me, but the Holy Ghost, or Comforter, remained vague and irrelevant to my life. I figured, If God is All, and the Christ communicates the relationship of a perfect God and His perfect creation, what is left for that Holy Ghost guy to do? I had a desire to clarify who, or what, it was.
So I talked with my grandmother, who has been in the Christian Science healing practice for many years. While I expected a complicated, foggy explanation of what role the Holy Ghost played, I instead received a wonderfully clear one. "This," she said as she displayed her hand in a gently closed fist, palm down, "is like God. This," she opened her hand and showed her fingers, "is like the Son. And this," she wiggled her fingers, "is like the Holy Ghost." She continued, explaining that the Holy Ghost acts; it moves thought. She opened up her copy of Science and Health where hand-scribbled notes sprung like grass between bricks of type. Written next to Mary Baker Eddy's spiritual definition of Holy Ghost in the Glossary—"Divine Science; the development of eternal Life, Truth, and Love" (p. 588)—was a rather large, handwritten definition of development from a dictionary. It read, "The act or a process of setting forth or making clear by degrees or in detail; to make visible or manifest; to make active; to expand by a process of growth; to grow." For me, that description of development was the vehicle to understanding the Holy Ghost.
The Holy Ghost being synonymous with the Comforter, I've come to see that the Holy Ghost is not something far removed from me, but tangibly near—the divine Spirit that makes itself manifest in my life, guiding me in everything I do. It can be felt in the tenderness of a parent's patience, or witnessed in the mighty calm of an ocean. And it's as easy to hear as that "still small voice" of God—coming to us as our own intuition.
