As we enter into the Pentecost season and we begin to meditate on the Holy Spirit gifted to us, I also begin to mediate on how our lives are a lot like art and how the Holy Spirit helps to create something beautiful out of them. Our Father God, being the ultimate Artist, has blessed many of us with the creativity and abilities to create beautiful things. But often times, in the life of an artist, we mess up or get things wrong. When this happens, how do we react? Do we simply throw away our work or do we create something more out of the mistake? These sorts of things make me think about how God reacts to bad things happening to His creation and how the Holy Spirit is enlisted to correct and make good the bad things.
In anticipation of the Holy Spirit’s coming on Pentecost, an insight from Archbishop Luis Martinez’s The Sanctifier gives us a clear image of how the Holy Spirit works in our lives. The author refers to the Spirit as the Artist of souls:
“Is not sanctity the supreme art? God has only one ideal, which … encompasses all the highest forms of beauty. This ideal is Jesus. … [The Spirit’s] action is not exterior nor intermittent, but intimate and constant. He enters into the depths of our souls, penetrates the innermost recesses, and takes up his permanent dwelling there to produce later on this magnificent work.”
In our lives when we sin or do something ungodly it’s like coloring in the wrong spot, spilling paint or creating something we’re not proud of. However when these things happen the Holy Spirit can come and use the stains and mess-ups to make it apart of His art. Without knowing our sin and evil parts, we can’t truly understand God’s grace and love towards us. In the same way, our lives can still be a beautiful work of art despite our failures and sins, but only if we let the Holy Spirit work.
Take an artist, whose wife observes him painting. As he begins to paint, his wife continues to comment how strange the color choices looked on his canvas and tries to take control to help him create something more beautiful. The artist smiles and continues to work as he was and eventually, his wife lets him work. When the wife comes back after a couple of hours, she’s awestruck. The painting that she thought had no beauty and no future became something marvelous. She never could have imagined this before. God works within our souls, sculpting and painting with the Holy Spirit, however it is up to us whether we let Him work.
Will we be a willing canvas for the Holy Spirit to work on this coming Pentecost? Or will we continuously nitpick all the mistakes and things wrong with the canvas? Instead of throwing us away, God is forever trying to paint us as a picture of Christ, but often times we take our own brush and try to paint what we think we should look like. God is surely painting us as a picture of Christ, with the Holy Spirit as His brush and Jesus’ redeeming blood as His paint. I hope this Pentecost season that we would all let the Holy Spirit work within our hearts and souls.
Editorial by Danielle White
