God is our Best Electric Blanket. God is the One Who blankets us with so much comforting love that we can relax and hear His voice whisper "Perfect love casts out fear" when we get cold feet and want to run away from love's commitments.
God blankets us with the ardor of peace to melt the icy anger and hatred damming up our soul's river of forgiveness.
Turning away from God is unplugging the cord that links us to Him Who is the Source of all our Power. The blanket of His love and peace may still be wrapped around us, because He lives in our souls, but we can no longer sense the comfort, delight, and sheer energy of His Presence. Life assails us with the wind, rain, snow, and sleet of tensions and troubles; if our Divine Blanket of Protection is unplugged, we curl up and duck our heads, shivering, freezing, and too stressed- out to know what to do next, where to turn next.
We may remain "plugged in" to God, but if we ignore Him and don't talk to Him, we've turned off the control button which is Prayer. If the control button is turned off, we can't turn the dial of discernment to the right "temperature" for the Holy Spirit to enflame us with wisdom and counsel. God can't call to us to "put the heat on" until we re-connect our entire communication and heating system and, resting underneath His blanket of warmly-loving, energizing strength, learn from Him which courageous way to turn.
When we stay faithfully plugged in to the Power Who is the Living God, the One Who is always faithful to us; when we keep our control button which is prayer always turned on so we are aware of God and alive to His passionate life surging around us and within us, - then we are always warmed and empowered and ignited by the Holy Spirit Who sustains all life.
It's the rare person who remembers or thinks of the Holy Spirit, whom we name "The Lord and Giver of Life" in the Creed. Most of us think of God the Father (or Mother) or Jesus Christ when we think of God. We forget the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity.
This is one way to think of God, Holy Trinity:
God is Creator, the Source of all, Whom Christian tradition calls God the Father.
But that is not all there is. God is God a second way, becoming enfleshed in Jesus Christ to save us, and we speak of and pray to God the Son.
But that is still not all. God is God a third time, "continually gifting the world with gracious divine presence, sparking love, drawing all things towards the future, and now we call God Holy Spirit. It is all the one God, but we use a triple mode of address to signal the three-fold way God has self-communicated in history." (Elizabeth Ann Johnson) One God. Three Persons in complete ever-active community.
"The Spirit is first and foremost the Creator Spirit who creates, empowers, and fills the whole world with life. Therefore we may actually encounter the Spirit everywhere. In the most basic way, the Spirit sustains every place, every moment, every creature, the whole interconnected community of creation itself." (Elizabeth Ann Johnson, in "Abounding in Kindness.")
So often we think of the Holy Spirit as symbolized by the tongues of flame that descended upon the apostles and disciples, profoundly changing and gifting them at Pentecost. Fire has no definite shape; it is always changing and unable to be touched, as mysterious as the hidden Spirit whom we only glimpse in its Divine influence. Fire can give warmth and comfort in a campfire, cook food for us, yet be as dangerous as lightning, as the sun if you try to look directly at it, as awe-inspiring as the Burning Bush Which Moses realized made the ground It flamed upon holy. Like fire, the Spirit is not confined; the Spirit's breath-taking sphere of influence is the entire universe.
In the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote of how the Spirit transforms us and all of creation into something even more alive - through the fiery glow of love:
"If fire passing through a mass of iron makes the whole of it glow, so that what was cold becomes burning and what was black is made bright, so too the power of the Spirit transforms hearts and minds, and indeed the clay of creation itself, so that what was cold and dark becomes bright and glowing."
Elizabeth Ann Johnson says:
"The Creator Spirit is the unceasing, dynamic flow of loving power that sustains the world, brings forth life, weaves connections between all creatures, and repairs what gets damaged, all the while being profoundly present at the heart of all things." ( in "Abounding in Kindness.")
The Holy Spirit, like the Father and the Son, is the Divine Outpouring of creative, life-giving Love. "The love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us," says St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans (5:5.)
Whenever we love ourselves, forgive ourselves, appreciate our own wondrousness, we have been empowered by God's Holy Spirit. And "Love between spouses and partners, parent and child, ministers and their people, those who give and receive kind service: wherever creative love enriches life, the spirit is present and operating." (Johnson.) Whenever social systems are renewed and the poor, the widow, the refugee, the homeless, the sick, and the orphan are cared for with loving justice, mercy, and peace, the Holy Spirit is at work among us.
The Holy Spirit is also invoked by those who have the gift of healing, and by those active in the Prayer Blanket ministry. Our daughter was given a Prayer Blanket when she was diagnosed with cancer, and snuggled under it as she received chemotherapy. Even as her energy was being drained by the chemicals pouring into her body, the loving prayers of those praying personally for her for physical, emotional, and spiritual healing were blanketing her with the Spirit's powerful, comforting, energizing love.
The Holy Spirit is present, active, and operating in us - when we're plugged into the Spirit! If we're plugged in, and if we pray, we rest under the warming and energizing Divine Electric Blanket of Protection and Peace which is the Holy Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life. In the Holy Spirit Sequence on Pentecost, we pray
"Bend the stubborn heart and will,
Melt the frozen, warm the chill,
Guide the steps that go astray...."
So the Holy Spirit of God, undergirding all life like an electric current, powerfully pursues the sinner and the lost, purifying, absolving, healing, leading us to contrition, revivifying, ending perplexity.....the life of the life of all creatures....
As Basil of Caesarea, in his great work on the Holy Spirit says "Let us not be afraid of being too extravagant in what we say about the Holy Spirit; our thoughts will always fall short."