Holy Spirit, Tuner of our Souls
Think of the Holy Spirit as the tuner of our souls and personalities. Like a piano tuner tackles a piano that has long sat idled, the Holy Spirit takes our neglected souls and our existing personalities and attunes them so that they agree in pitch and harmonize well. He adjusts the “keys” and the “strings” within our personalities so that the music we make resounds and echoes its heavenly source. Often additional tune=ups are needed so that the piano or the soul can hold their tune for extended periods until the changing conditions of resistance in us once again affect the pitch and harmony.
Like a good piano tuner can “voice” a piano to attune it to the pianist’s ear, the Holy Spirit can “voice” the personality so that it resounds harmoniously with the soul, so that there is no incongruence, so that the inner person and what he or she displays to the world are the same.
The Holy Spirit attunes the person and his soul, so that they become one in the Spirit. Then there is no conflict between two agendas. There are no disharmonies. There is only congruence and a melding of purpose and lives—the soul’s and the personality’s. What I have been given to understand about the soul is this: that the soul is that part of us in the unconscious that is designed to be the communicator between us and God and is, in fact, the presence of God within us. So when we honor the soul and its agenda, we are honoring the Creator as well. It has tried throughout our lives to call attention to its agenda(God’s agenda for us); as long as we ignore it, we have no way to deeply connect to God. When we start to pay attention to what the soul is voicing for God, we are opening the doors for the Holy Spirit to be active within us, healing, transforming and conforming us to God’s will.
As we pay more and more attention to the soul, we are bringing it out of the unconscious and into the center of our lives, at the same time as God becomes the center of our lives.
The Holy Spirit holds the soul’s agenda as primary and brings the personality into compliance with the soul’s agenda. That means that all human accumulations—beliefs, ideas, assumptions, etc., from our families and our cultures need to correspond, to harmonize with the soul. All that doesn’t match the soul’s agenda is what needs to be transformed.
The idea is not to discard what is not congruent with the soul but to love it into harmony. So the sin, the guilt, the shame, the errors, the neglected, the nonconforming—all these parts of us are healed, softened, embraced, accepted. All these disparate parts of ourselves that we once rejected and tried to shun, are now loved, embraced, and held. Whatever is loved is transformed first by shining a bright light on all incongruities and then by an embrace of what is there. For love heals, restores, accepts. And what is embraced by love transforms, raises itself, loves itself into compliance. It is miraculous what Love does!
In essence what the Holy Spirit does is to embrace the whole person—body, mind, soul and heart—into a mighty whole that serves the Lord. We can delay, postpone, or misdirect the Spirit, but eventually, if we are at all willing to follow him, he will undo all our attempts at misdirection and show us what the whole embrace of love means.
And then when we fall into his arms, wanting that integration and wholeness more than we want self-protection, giving up our preference for no change in our lives and relinquishing our ego-self-preservation. Because we finally see what it would mean to live as whole people of God, not divided, not alienated from our own selves, not distanced from God. Finally, we step willingly, eagerly into the Spirit’s arms, because we see how very beneficial it will be for our selves, for our souls, for God himself!
With the Holy Spirit as tuner of our selves and our souls, we can relax deeply and “let go and let God.” For our battle has seemingly been with God but mostly with ourselves over issues of absolute trust and embracing and accepting his love for us. Once we really embrace and trust his providence and faithfulness, then we are ready to give up our own efforts to meet our needs and see that what we truly value and need just gets done by God’s providence.
Once we can feel his love, not just “know” that he loves us, we can truly relax. For the Lord knows much better than we do what we need and what will best express who we are in this world. And he needs each of us to be doing exactly that—being who we were created to be in this world. This is how we will usher in the kingdom. This is how we become the second coming of Christ! When enough of us have gotten the message of love and have been transformed, attuned to our souls, we will be heralding in the kingdom.
Have you ever thought that the second coming of Christ is the coming of the multitudes in his name? Is this even possible? Desirable? Why has our focus been just on Jesus himself coming again? In John 14:1-3 which is part of the Final Discourses, Jesus’ last meeting with the disciples when he stated that he would come again, we have been focused on Christ coming. Let’s entertain a new way of looking at how he might come again to this world and transform it.
When enough of us have embraced the workings of the Holy Spirit in our lives, when we have submitted to his healing and transformative powers, when we have sublimated ourselves to our soul’s agenda which was implanted in us at our conception, then we will be realizing God’s kingdom with Christ here in this world. We will have healed what the gift of free will has brought us and this world. We will be in the world with love. And the world will never be the same again.
How many of us do you think it will take? A thousand? Ten thousand? Or tens of thousands? Will you be one of those who ushers in the kingdom on earth? Will you turn your life over to the Holy Spirit so that he might attune you to the vibration of your soul, of God himself? Can you envision how that would be? Think of the kingdom embracing everyone. Be the kingdom here on earth. Take up your own soul’s agenda and see what the Lord has in store for you. You could change all our lives! Thanks be to God!
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Questions to ponder over the week: Will I allow the Holy Spirit full access to my whole life for the express purpose of transforming all of me into someone who can really serve God? What areas of my life, joy or pain, do I hold back from him? What would I have to give up to totally follow the Holy Spirit?
Blessing for the week: May we allow the Holy Spirit full access to our egos and personalites, our hearts and souls, minds and bodies, so that he may transform us into creatures of love. May we say, “Yes!” to everything God proposes for us. May we follow the Spirit willingly wherever he would take us.
If you’d like to see more of By the Waters, check these out:
–There’s a new video up on YouTube: “The First Four Commandments ”youtube.com/user/patsadams
–Check out my twitter feed at twitter.com/BTWwithPatAdams
–Check out the “Offerings” page on the website with a CD of guided meditations designed to help deepen your spiritual life and a series of booklets on the Life of the Spirit.
–Order individual tracks of the CD at cdbaby.com/cd/PatAdams1