As a child, I made a child’s sense of the Trinity: God was an old man with a long white beard who controlled and saw everything (ick!); Jesus a confusing blend of baby, carpenter, and robed king on a cross; and the Holy Ghost a deeper-voiced, more powerful version of Casper.

Some forty years later, even as I recognize the Nicene manipulation of words as a vehicle for complex theology—became incarnate from and proceeds from and with the father and the son—I still grapple with the images of old guy, itinerant preacher, and—and what?

The Spirit does not lend itself to any one portrayal.

Sure, Casper morphed over time in my imagination, thanks in part to Art History class as well as to the 1978 prayer book’s adoption of Holy Spirit—at first into the hovering, foreshortened bird in Piero della Francesca’s triptych panel of the baptism of Jesus and, more recently, into the wind in the trees, the surge beneath (or behind?) breaking waves, the striated, molten gold of the sunset.

In my mind, the third component of the Three-in-One has carried much of its power in the fact of its disembodied nature. Unlike the other two, it could be seen only in the effect it had. In a world saturated with imagery (from God’s walking in the garden at evening to His finger reaching across the chapel ceiling; from babies on Christmas postage stamps to harrowed carved crucifixions), the invisibility of the spirit made it feel more accessible.

Last week, I confessed to my spiritual director that I have a problem with trust. Even with God.

Especially with God. (I know I’m not alone in this, even as I feel compelled to remind myself of all the ways I do trust.)

At some deep level, I can’t let go of the buried…I hesitate to call it “treasure,” because it’s not a stash of goodies I’m afraid of losing as much as a piece of myself. If anyone gets close enough, they might take me away. If I completely and utterly let down my guard, I will disappear, vanish, melt, dissolve. I will no longer have myself to hold onto.

And yet, isn’t that the point? Doesn’t scripture tell us over and over that to hoard is to deny God? That to die to ourselves is to find eternal life? That freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose?

Jeff reminded me that the bounty of grace is not a pie to be divvied up: the more takers, the less everyone gets. The Spirit doesn’t work that way. There’s enough for everyone, and still more.

Surrender, and all that. But whenever I pray to God for surrender, or read Jesus’ words on the subject, I go to my intellect, my brain, and leave behind the intuition, the emotion, the trust. I can’t get those images out of my mind. I can’t, more often than not, stop thinking.

I told Jeff all this. And then I said, “I trust the Spirit.” I always have, without thinking about it or wondering why—because, at least in part, of that lack of embodiment. The more abstract Spirit—or, as one website puts it, the essence to Jesus’ substance—makes it easier to get out of my own head.

There’s a danger in this abstraction, of course. The Holy Spirit can be the loosy-goosiest of the three persons of the Trinity, the one that can most easily (whether intentionally or not) be uncoupled from the Godhead and devolve into anything-goes spirituality—or worse. (I’m halfway through Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.)

Jesus warns us of this danger, this potential slipperiness, when he makes clear (Matthew 12:31-32) that the one unforgivable sin is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

I take seriously the vows I repeat at every baptism, the creed I intone every Sunday. When I make the intention to pray to the Holy Spirit, I intend to do so in keeping with that covenant and that creed, with the experience of the risen Christ and the tradition of His teachings. I intend to do this without having to read a lot of doctrine. Beyond that—I’ll let you know.

About twelve years ago, when I found my way back to church as an adult, I felt giddy with discovery—even as I battled the anxiety and despair that had led me there.

We find God at the end of our ropes, a priest told me then.

Now, I think of trusting in the Spirit as a rope—no longer leading me out of the pit but, this time, carrying me deeper into mystery.

And, yes, to trust.