"In the light of the charismatic experience of life let us ask, finally: who or what is the Holy Spirit according to these experiences?
"In the charismatic experience, God's Spirit is felt as a vitalizing energy. In the nearness of God we are happy, and life begins to vibrate. We experience ourselves in the vibrancies of the divine field of force. That is why charisma is also described as dynamis or energenia. From earliest times, the charismatic experience of the Holy Spirit has been pictured as a flowing, an outpouring and a shining. If we take these experiences as starting point, we can say that the Holy Spirit appears as the well of life — the origin of the torrent of energy — the source of the light that gives the shining splendor. The expressions used here point to the doctrine of emanation.
"What does that mean for a Spirit which is 'poured out upon all flesh'? The gifts of the Spirit are then not creations of the Spirit, for the Spirit himself is poured out in the gifts. So we cannot distinguish here between created and uncreated energies. The water of life which flows from the wellspring of life has the same quality as the spring itself. The relation between the one Spirit and the many gifts of the Spirit, and the relation of the one light to its many reflections, is not the detached relation of the creator to what he has created. It is much more intimate than that. Through the Spirit who is 'poured out' on all flesh, all flesh becomes spiritual. In the love of God which is 'poured out' in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, God himself is 'in us' and we ourselves are 'in God'. In the experience of the Spirit, God is primal, all-embracing presence, not a detached counterpart. In the charismatic experiences of the Spirit, we experience the reciprocal perichoresis of God and ourselves. That is a much more intimate communion that the community between Creator and creature. It is the communion of reciprocal indwelling. In the Holy Spirit the eternal God participates in our transitory life, and we participate in the eternal life of God. This reciprocal community is an immense, outflowing source of energy.
"We have called the energies of the Spirit which we charismatically experience, vitalizing energies, because they bring us to life. Since human life always becomes living only through love, we can, with great caution, call this divine energy an eroticizing energy. By eros we mean the force which holds the world together and keeps it alive, anthropologically and cosmologically: the power of attraction which unites, and the individual weight which simultaneously distinguishes. The rhythm of attraction and distance, affection and respect is the power of eros. So 'in the Spirit' we experience both the community and the diversity of the Spirit: unity in the diversity, and diversity in the community. We experience at one and the same time our socialization and our individuation. 'In the Spirit' we come to know the love that binds us and the freedom which makes us our own individual, separate selves.
"Finally when men and women lay hold of their existence charismatically, the Holy Spirit makes that existence shine. In pictures, earlier generations liked to depict this shining power of being in the form of a halo. What they were trying to say was that the life that is charismatically possessed and sanctified again becomes the image of God, and is illuminated by the divine glory (kabod, doxa) which it reflects. After he had encountered God, Moses was forced to veil his face because the people found the reflection of the divine glory unendurable (Ex. 18). Paul discovered 'the glory of God in the face of Christ' (II Cor. 4.6), and in the same passage describes the experience of the Spirit as being 'a bright shining in our hearts'. Today we should talk about the 'aura' or 'charm' of which the person concerned is unaware. We also talk about the 'atmosphere' in a group, which can be 'poisoned' or 'good'. There is a 'climate of trust' and 'a climate of mistrust.' Every life radiates its own atmosphere. This atmosphere results from the things that concern us, and with which we concern ourselves, but it has to do above all with the things we most of all fear and most of all love. Other people are either unnerved and oppressed by this unconscious ambience, or stimulated and quickened by it. Life can radiate ambition and fear, or peace and tranquility; and in the same way it can radiate experiences of God.
"This divine radiance of existence is something of which we are unaware, and this has to be so; for 'the person who looks at himself does not shine. But the person who does not look at himself will be filled with light', says the book of Chinese Wisdom Tao-te-Ching in its twenty-second chapter."