Last week I explained why the Spirit cannot always speak distinctly from our own thoughts and our own feelings if it is to fulfill its mission to comfort and sanctify.

This week I am approaching the problem from another point of view and offering a different explanation (though it may be the same explanation in the end).

Succinctly, the problem to be explained is why the Spirit speaks so softly that sometimes it is very hard or even impossible to distinguish our own thoughts and feelings from those whispered by the Spirit.

So let’s think about Zeno’s paradox. A turtle or an arrow or a runner, he says, can never get where they are going because first they always have to go halfway, and then halfway through the remaining half, and so on.

His paradox makes no sense if you think of the object as an object in motion. Then as the distance halves, the time needed to cover it also halves, and voila. But if you think of the turtle as a static object, then there is a real mystery about how it can change positions. How can something be at point A and then at point B? Saying that it went through a bunch of intervening points does not answer the question because no matter how thinly you slice the points, the turtle still must be at point A and then at point A.0000001, and the discontinuity still remains.

In its role as Comforter and Sanctifier, the Spirit is about changing us. It is about moving us from spiritual point A to spiritual point B.

If we take ourselves as we are now, there is a mystery. There is a moment of singularity where somehow we are at the same time still who we are now and transitioning to who we will become. There can be no clear and tidy perception of that.

Or let us think of ourselves as an object in spiritual motion. Who we are right now includes our trajectory towards becoming something different. If that is the case, the higher, better things the Spirit whispers to us are already part of who we are.