Meeting As Such

C S Lewis worried that he could no more ‘meet’ God than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. We could add: the atheist is more sure he could no more ‘meet’ God than Shakespeare could meet Hamlet. Of course, Shakespeare could meet that person contracted to embody Hamlet, and (famously) Shakespeare played Hamlet’s father. The author is the father of his creation, in more than one sense. Say what you like about Christianity, it does build its spiritual reality around a father, his son, and some strange, hard-to-pin-down tertium quid, some spirit that is more quality than entity. Perhaps that is the way to think of the Holy Spirit, as meeting as such, as the spiritual hypothecation of loving connection.