Happy Feast of Pentecost! Here is one of Knox's best:
The Holy Spirit
If a man should set out to go through the Bible, pausing and making a meditation wherever he found
material, his attention would be caught without fail, I think, by the second verse of it. “Earth was still an
empty waste, and darkness hung over the deep; but already, over its waters, stirred the breath of God.”
Creation still in the melting-pot, so that we have nothing for our composition of place except a formless
sea of undifferentiated matter; dark, not by some effect of shadow, but with that primal darkness that
reigned before light was made. And over this inert mass, like the mist that steals up from a pool at
evening, God’s breath his Spirit, was at work. Already it was his plan to educe from this chaos the
cosmos he had resolved to make, passing up through its gradual stages till it culminated in the creation of
Man.
Deep in your nature and mine lies just such a chaos of undifferentiated matter, of undeveloped
possibilities. Psychology calls it the unconscious. It is a great lumber-room, stocked from our past history.
Habits and propensities are there, for good and evil; memories, some easily recaptured, some tucked away
in the background; unreasoning fears and antipathies; illogical associations, which link this past
experience with that; primitive impulses, which shun the light, and seek to disguise themselves by a
smoke-screen of reasoning; inherited aptitudes, sometimes quite unexpected. Out of this welter of
conditions and tendencies the life of action is built up, yours and mine. And still, as at the dawn of
creation, the Holy Spirit moves over those troubled waters, waiting to educe from them, with the
cooperation of our wills, the entire life of the Christian.
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