The imitation of the Spirit

Traditional language about Christian spiritual formation has long been shaped by the impulse to imitate Jesus, a call we hear ringing in Paul’s exhortation to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). Thomas Aquinas describes this process as “manuduction”: Christ guides or “leads by the hand” his siblings to union with his Father, both making it possible and showing us the way. Christians have framed this activity of growing in Christlikeness in quite a variety of ways—through self-sacrifice or taking up a life of poverty and simplicity, through a focus on interiority and prayer, through committing to acts of radical justice and the breaking of social barriers. Common to all these variations in spiritual formation is the believer being conformed to Christ, a transformation enabled by the Holy Spirit through divine grace. We imitate Christ; we are empowered to do so by the Holy Spirit.

I would like to suggest, as a thought experiment or spiritual exercise, flipping that narrative. What insights might emerge about the life of faith if we took the Spirit’s way of moving among and with us as the model to imitate? What if we imitated the Spirit, empowered by the redemptive love of Christ?

Certainly, Christ through his incarnation became God with us, Immanuel, the center point of redemption history—and therefore following and being united to Christ is rightfully spoken of as the shape of the believer’s life. However, there is also a special way in which the Holy Spirit is present to us and with us in our own world and our time. When we ask how we might imitate the Spirit, the central question of spiritual formation becomes this: What can I learn about graced, charity-­informed interactions with and among the people around me by considering how the Holy Spirit acts toward us? In this framing, counterintuitive as it may be, the Holy Spirit becomes a model for the concrete activities of human living animated by the love of Christ.