Para-Marital Blessing as Biblical, Sacramental, and Political Practice

ParaPara-Marital Blessing as Biblical, Sacramental, and Political Practice

Abstract First, a definition: By “para-marital”, I intend reference to such terms as parachurch or paramilitary. A para-sacramental action participates in certain characteristic features of the sacrament without fully identifying with the sacrament. Marriage may be an all-or-nothing affair—Sondheim's “Marry Me a Little” is meant as irony and pathos—but I believe my coinage names a meaningful range of relationships with their own theological significance, distinct from both sacramental marriage and singleness. I would likewise contrast it with other possible prefixes: para-marital is not anti-marital (primarily critique of the institution), nor simply extra-marital (as marriage is in some sense the model by which the para-marital defines itself). The intervention of this dissertation is to consider para-marital blessing as a legitimate pastoral option, especially as a voice of the church to marginalized relationships. I plan to proceed by reflecting on this practice using five distinct theological genres, each with its own

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separate chapter: Biblical, practical, social-ethical, political, and Trinitarian. This structure is not meant to set out a unified argument, as in a monograph, but to offer various points of entry to the practice of para-marital blessing in response to a range of possible questions about it. The five proposed essay-chapters are as follows: 1) Blessing's Biblical roots. Scripture prominently deploys blessing in the life of Abraham, in the Psalms, in Galatians, and in the Lucan canticles. In all these loci, blessing attends and defines the people of Israel but graciously extends through them to all nations. 2) Blessing as para-sacramental action. It can be modeled as a superset of sacrament, an extension of sacramental grace beyond the particular people constituted by the sacrament in question. 3) Blessing as pastoral and prophetic intervention. A thoughtexperiment, parallel to the case of same-sex couples: What if a church blessed economically marginal relationships, whose parties had determined their lives were too unstable for marriage? What are the costs and benefits? Paradoxically, such a blessing would affirm the

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parties theologically and ecclesially, without directly challenging their second-class citizenship politically. 4) Blessing, marriage, and citizenship. Sacramental marriage requires a joint account of ecclesial/heavenly and civil institutions: The metaphor of “second-class citizenship” with regard to blessings is well-taken. I would suggest that blessing is oriented primarily toward the general eschaton and a heavenly politeuma, while marriage is oriented toward earthly politeuma and the personal eschaton (“till death do us part”). Thus the pastoral paradox seen above. 5) The agent of blessing. Properly speaking, clergy bless on behalf of the people, by participation in the creative and providential blessing of God (cf. Frettlöh). I propose to read this action pneumatologically: The Holy Spirit befriends matter (especially “gross matter”, what empire devalues) through blessing and brings it into Christ's presence, and thus into the Trinitarian life. Having laid out the dissertation's main question and overall structure, I will now proceed to a more detailed proposal for each essay, including a chapter title, a genre, and the question I take the essay to address.

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I. Biblical Roots [Genre: Biblical theology] Why have the churches used blessing, in recent decades, in this para-sacramental sense? I suggest the inspiration is Biblical, namely the use of blessing in the life of Abraham, in the Psalms, in Galatians, and in the Lucan canticles. In all these loci, blessing attends and defines the people of Israel but graciously extends through them to all nations. Psalm 67 is my keynote. The Psalmist invokes the Aaronic, particular, national blessing with, I will argue, an unusually cosmopolitan intention. The cultic-monarchial-covenantal sense of blessing, as God's election of and provision for Zion, is (unusually for the Psalter) paired with the eschatological theme of the nations' ultimate awe for God. The striking contrast is with the enthronement psalms (e.g. 47, 68, 95). 67 shares themes, language, and some tone with them, but lacks the triumphalist note. God does not battle, subdue, or punish, but rather draws the nations into fear through sheer goodness to

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Israel. The nearest parallel is perhaps the shorter Ps 100, but even that (through the formula “YHWH is El”) appropriates a rival pantheon and thus aggressively replaces it. What makes the difference? Theologically, I suggest, it is precisely the unique invocation of the root brch, for liturgical blessing. I will lay out this argument in conversation, especially, with the line of German Psalter commentators running from Gunkel to Krauss and Westermann. I will also treat Charles Ives as a key psalter commentator, by way of his fin de siècle choral setting of this psalm. His interpretation, in fact, is a major influence on this project. Although musically adventurous, featuring both astringent bitonality and some aggressive voice leading, it was intended for liturgical use in his New Jersey congregation. The bridging of gaps (between keys, musically, and between registers of musical thought, sociologically) is a crucial theme both in the Psalm and this setting. In light of this Psalmic model, I will (following Frettlöh closely) offer a reading of the blessing of Abraham in Gen 12:1-4 as simultaneously particular and universal. God's intention in blessing the

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patriarch is to elect a particular people in order to affect the whole world—not so as to erase the particularity of Israel, but to affirm it, even to bless it. The people will bless themselves by Abraham, thus rendering themselves and Abraham both blessed simultaneously. In terms of commentators, Frettlöh frames this in terms of an argument between von Rad and Blum; I may have Kierkegaard somewhat more in mind as well, who only comes into Frettlöh's story insofar as he influences Bonhoeffer. Paul's reframing of Abraham's story in Galatians inevitably sits behind this reading, and with it the history of Christian supercessionism. In terms of NT studies, I find the cosmic commentary of Martyn and the anti-imperial of Kahl complementary, as showing more truly universal routes to an Abrahamic ancestry (their status as UTS faculty is a happy coincidence). The important point, for the present purpose, is that Christian appropriation of Abrahamic lineage need not negate the legitimacy of the Jewish lineage, insofar as Paul's critique is not of Jewish law but of a cosmic principle (Martyn) or Roman domination (Kahl).

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Theologically, the work of Frettlöh on the church's being coblessed with and through Abraham persuasively summarizes and deploys contemporary German commentary on this nexus. Her decisive emphasis is that one can only share the blessing God offers to Abraham and his descendants if one does, in fact, share in blessing and affirming Abraham and his descendants. Anti-supercessionism becomes the criterion for sharing in this blessing. Most of all, however, I find Origen's reading of Genesis generative, as he charts (for a Palestinian Jewish audience) the increasing universalism of God's call and covenant with the patriarch, which both elects a particular people and means for its blessing to fill the earth. I have written about this previously (in fact, in my UTS application essay!) but upon reflection, I find the argument all the more compelling for its relation to Origen's sacramental and trinitarian logic. But more on this well below. The Lucan canticles complete the circle by bringing this early Christian logic back into poetry, and ultimately into the church's liturgical life. Christ (in the Benedictus) and Mary (in the Magnificat)

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become the bearers of blessing, and thus of reconciliation between separated peoples and revolutionary justice. Of the critical commentators I find Bovon most persuasive here, but my case around these passages is at least as much liturgical as it is historical-critical.

II. Blessing and Marriage, Distinguished and Related [Genre: Practical theology, including both liturgics and polity] The vexed question of the “blessing of same-sex unions” provides the subject for this essay. In particular, growing from the practice of the communities that have nourished me, I want to focus on the function and implications of the word “blessing” in this context. What do we mean by a blessing here? What does such blessing accomplish? What broader theological and practical implications, in particular, do the use of blessing rites in this context suggest? Over the past seven years, I have watched three different communities (which happen to be Episcopalian) vigorously deploy the language of blessing in their internal and external lives. Anne Fowler, recently-retired rector of St John's, Jamaica Plain, was often called

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upon to close otherwise-secular rallies for marriage equality in prayer; she invariably used a version of the Aaronic blessing in Genesis. Stephanie Spellers, founding organizer of The Crossing, Boston, understood blessing as the heart of her priestly ministry there, using such language in her outreach to a largely post-Christian missional context. St Michael's, Manhattan, like the other two churches, regularly offered “blessings” for same-sex couples which mirrored marriage services. The practices of these communities vis à vis blessing, together with the relevant deliberations and documents of the Episcopal Church, are the starting point for this proposed dissertation. Dogmatics, after all, needs a church. Other denomination-level discussions of the same matters, however, are certainly relevant; I expect to treat the homologous Lutheran and Presbyterian discussions, at least, as well as giving some attention to Reformed and probably Roman Catholic sacramental theologies. I will not consider this argument successful if it fails to take such data into account. Within liturgical practice, I find three useful analogies between the para-marital blessing and other, less-controversial uses of blessing

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language. The first is the blessing of the created order made particular in, e.g., the consecration of liturgical hardware, or the blessing of herbs on rogation days and candles on the Feast of the Presentation. Advocates of blessing same-sex unions often make this argument a fortiori: If we can bless boats and house pets, then why not the love of human beings? The second is the blessing or commissioning of persons for particular ministries, with the ministry in question here being that a couple undertakes together. Something like this, I would posit, is what the Church of England's very recent guidelines on the subject (in the “Pilling Report”) have in mind: They make it a point not to model the service on a marriage, which inevitably makes it look more like commissioning (say) a Lay Eucharistic Visitor. The third, and to my mind the most a propos, is the analogy to the blessing offered to noncommunicants specifically in place of the Eucharist. A blessing, in this case, would be a para-sacramental act, modeled functionally on the sacrament, casting the recipient under its penumbra if not fully under its shade. With the image of “penumbra,” I deliberately invoke the

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of Justice Douglas' Supreme Court opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, which found a right to marital privacy not in the text of any particular clause of the US Constitution but in its “penumbras and emanations”. That finding has subsequently underpinned those of Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas, and most recently U.S. v. Windsor. My point is less to endorse the logic of that line of cases—the queer critique of Lawrence in Puar 2006 is notably compelling—than it is to rhetorically (re)assert the relevance of high US constitutional theory to theology done in a US context. As I have often said in conversation, I do not know what a “blessing of a same-sex union” may be, but I am confident of what it is not—namely, a sacramental marriage. That formulation, in turn, requires at least a partial account of sacramental marriage. Christian theologies of marriage have proven notoriously difficult to systematize, from the earliest New Testament records to the present. The aporia at the heart of Matthew 22:18-28/Luke 20:22-32, for instance, is a moment of apophatic apocalyptic, whereas the (arguably pseudo-Pauline) witness of Ephesians 5 is either primarily ecclesiological or a troublingly

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uncritical reinscription of patriarchal norms. I will not attempt here to define a new, comprehensive synthesis on marriage, but I do take the following three points as axiomatic: A sacramental marriage (1) must describe itself as a marriage; (2) its participants should be recognized as the celebrants; and (3) it must, at least at the outset, intend one party's death as its temporal horizon. It might be objected that these axioms are missing several traditional descriptors. I have not, for instance, said anything in particular about sex, e.g. by enjoining lifelong fidelity to a single partner. Although I will often speak of “couples”, I do not treat the number of parties as essential. Nor does my account engage with language about marriage's purpose of “mutual help and comfort”, in either a traditional or a more feminist mode. My reasons for this silence are twofold. 1) I do not wish to endorse the rather self-justifying tendency of the more conservative theologies of gay marriage to strongly emphasize partner exclusivity as the basis of a Christian marriage ethic. Older queer theologies often reflected the broad range of practices,

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monogamous and otherwise, within queer communities—a point helpfully and courageously remembered throughout Cheng 2011. Likewise, too great an emphasis on a mutuality ethic assumes that marriage, to be justifiable, must be free of internal power dynamics, which seems to me simply false. To put the same point more positively, I want to be open, at least, to queer theology drawing insight from poly and kink communities. I do not propose to enter that conversation here, but I would regret foreclosing it. 2) The factors I do choose to enumerate—couple as celebrant; a selfdescription as marriage; a lifetime commitment—all seem to me most theologically relevant. They relate to the questions of agency and eschatology, both of which are crucial to understanding marriage as a sacrament. They name marriage's celebrant and horizon, and in turn its relation to Jesus Christ, ecumenically regarded as the one true Sacrament of Whom the others (however enumerated) are particular expressions. Liturgies for the blessing of same-sex unions, as deployed in my home parishes, have often met condition (2), of emphasizing the couple

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as celebrants, but by definition have demurred on (1), calling the union a marriage (unless previously named as such by the state). It is on these grounds that I find the analogy to the para-Eucharistic blessing most instructive. Blessings of a house or a newly-commissioned lector are easily understood as extensions of the divine blessing of creation, on the one hand, and as exercises of the baptismal charism on the other. The blessing of a same-sex union draws from neither. It declares itself a liturgical, celebratory action that exists in parallel to a sacrament without fully partaking in the sacramental grace. Such liturgies have tended to grow out of situations where gay and lesbian couples are marginal in the broader society but welcome in particular parishes. Episcopal clergy are bound by canon to offer marriage rites only when the couple would be legally married in the same jurisdiction, yoking sacramental to state understandings of marriage. In the absence of marriage equality, then, some such para-sacramental action is in fact the best a supportive priest could canonically offer. Their use as such was originally prophetic, and remains thus in much of the church: I think of the Diocese of Texas, which has authorized two

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parishes to employ the trial rite for the blessing of relationships, but could not (without canonical revision, or else disobedience) allow the use of a Prayer Book marriage rite. This origin, I would posit, has been crucial to LGBT advocates' enthusiasm for official rites of blessing—for instance, as commissioned at the Episcopal Church's General Convention in 2009 and approved for provisional use in 2012. The goal has not been formally committing the church to marriage equality in the sacramental and canonical arenas, but honoring and empowering the work of welcoming congregations and dioceses. An illustrative legislative anecdote: At both conventions, the Diocese of Massachusetts had sponsored revisions to the marriage canons that would have rendered them gender-neutral, the most elegant solution if canonical marriage equality were the goal. Those proposed resolutions were rerouted from the Canons Committee to that on the Prayer Book, Liturgy, and Music, and ultimately merged with resolutions on blessing same-sex unions—in keeping, in fact, with the legislative strategy of the LGBT advocates in Integrity. (The details of the legislative process are important here, as church legislation is one of the major venues for

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informal dogmatics at the denominational scale. I believe a similar story would emerge from other mainline churches' processes on the same subject.)

III. Blessing a ParaPara-Marriage: A Thought Experiment [Genre: Social ethics] Why focus on para-marriage when marriage, itself, is both so important in Christian practice and so much under threat as a civil institution? Perhaps there is some need for para-marital blessing for same-sex couples in jurisdictions that will not marry them civilly. What will be the use of such blessings when marriage equality is a universal norm? America has a long and problematic history of legally excluding socially disempowered groups from marriage, including not only same-sex couples but Black people under slavery. Marriage's traditional role as guarantee of legitimate capital transfer is reflected today in the middle-class conflation of marriage with professional stability and

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homeownership. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that the lifelong commitment entailed by sacramental marriage not be undertaken without precisely that undergirding of material stability. Marriage therefore not only feels, but actually is, out of reach for many marginal communities. Queer and feminist critiques of marriage, up to and including today's sophisticated critiques of “homonationalism” as applied to marriage equality (Puar 2006), have long made this case. Blessing of relationships would therefore be pastorally appropriate and even prophetic, not only when marriage is legally unavailable, but when it is prudentially unwise. Consider, for instance, the following stock scenario, gathered from pastoral and sociological literature. A non-cohabiting couple in their early twenties has an unexpected but welcome child. The woman is relatively stably employed and provides the majority of the child's financial and parenting support. The father believes that if he married his girlfriend, she would expect him to be the primary breadwinner, which neither his education nor his employment history would allow. Short of marriage, however, he is proudly and frequently present to his

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child, understanding his role as a father primarily in terms of care and “quality time”. The mother, for her part, is proud that she can support both herself and her child without depending on a decent but perhaps somewhat undependable man. This couple has discerned that marriage is not for them, at this time, on the kinds of economic and prudential grounds to which mainline pastors are generally trained to defer. Nevertheless, if either member of the couple was part of a church, or approached one—say, for the child to be baptized—it might well be worth considering, in a pastoral setting, whether some form of public recognition of their relationship, short of marriage, would be appropriate and helpful. Blessing rites could provide such an option, giving the couple a meaningful chance to discern and liturgically enact the character they want their relationship to have. It could, indeed, offer a pastoral word to this couple, and a prophetic word to the broader community—that their relationship, in its complexities and imperfections, is still valuable and important in God's eyes. In such a scenario, a blessing would not be an option in churches

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that assume any non-marital relationship is too imperfect to bless, and perhaps even in those that see marriage as the ideal standard for human relationships. In the former case, a blessing would be unthinkable; in the latter, pastorally disastrous through its obvious condescension. The analogy to the eucharistic blessing is once again instructive here. A real-world example prompted this thought experiment. In 2009, the Church of England formalized a previously informal practice of simultaneously baptizing children and marrying their parents. Liturgies were propagated (a simple recombination of existing rites), alongside a celebratory press release. That remarkable official document acknowledged the massive attitudinal and demographic shift that brought one in five couples to marriage with preexisting children, while still expressing a hope that this sacramental moment will be a “new beginning”. Far from a shift in normative sexual ethics, I read this as this is a subtle call to repentance, named (no doubt sincerely) as “welcome”. The Foucaultian ironies here speak for themselves. Gay and lesbian critics were quick to point out that it reflects profound heterosexual privilege. I would add that, on the whole, it could be

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analyzed as an especially visible attempt to reinscribe existing theologies and liturgies for Christian marriage on a changing institution of the larger society. My own thought experiment is meant to make explicit how marriage language tends to conflate theological and socioeconomic realities. Often, the force of that conflation is to naturalize and “baptize” existing social norms. Churches that desire to offer hospitality and solidarity to marginalized people nevertheless balk at detaching sacramental marriage from the socioeconomic expectations that attend marriage as a state and social institution. If sacramental marriage were, in fact, clearly distinct in practice from socioeconomic marriage, there would be much more room for prophetic critique of the latter on the basis of the former. In the absence of that clear distinction, blessing liturgies developed for same-sex couples may be a fruitful site for other kinds of marginalized people to have their relationships affirmed. I am not aware of such rites being used in this way, but I hope this proposal points to the prophetic creativity potentially implicit in their language.

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IV. Blessing, Marriage, and Citizenship [Genre: Political theology] Doesn't a para-marital blessing, or indeed a para-eucharistic blessing, create a situation of “separate but equal” or “second-class citizenship”? When I posit the analogy between para-Eucharistic and para-marital blessings in church conversations, my interlocutors tend to respond with these metaphors. If we offer some people marriages and others blessings, then the blessing is self-evidently a lesser honor. My usual response is that there are good reasons not to receive communion. One might be Jewish, say, or not in good conscience. Likewise, there might be good reasons not to marry—a point that resonates with my fellow urban Episcopalians, especially those familiar with feminist and queer critiques of the institution from the 1970s. I do not, however, wish to dismiss altogether the intuitive connection between marriage and citizenship, as my questioners have named it. It is too deeply grounded in my communities, and too instructive. It is admittedly unfashionable in liturgically-oriented political theologies, which have been markedly

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anti-Erastian since the Tractarians and anti-Constantinian since the postliberals. Granted that our politeuma is properly in heaven, our marriages, per Jesus' explicit teaching, are not. In reflection on sacramental marriage, metaphors and logics drawn from earthly governance—in the present case, from liberal democracy—are quite properly yoked to those of the Bible. This is not, however, to say a more robustly eschatological politics is useless here. Any sacrament has an eschatological horizon. For marriage, however, it is a personal eschaton (death) and a national eschaton (justice). This is a situation for a method like Hooker's, seeking convergences between exegesis and regiment in the underlying logic of law through contemplative reason. This is not merely special pleading for an Anglican founder, but a methodological point. A eucharistic politics is more ecclesial, focusing on our heavenly politeuma; a marital politics is more national—a stance with at least as many problematics as promises, especially in light of contemporary queer theory. Marriage equality may be necessary for queer liberation without being sufficient.

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In fact, para-marital blessing liturgies, propounded (officially, in the Episcopal Church; unofficially in others) as a pastoral response to the needs of gay and lesbian parishioners, do not institute marriage equality for sacramental purposes. I suspect this inconsistency with marriage-equality norms is both unconscious and temporary. Within the Episcopal Church, it is plausible that the forthcoming report of a special commission on the Episcopal Church's theology of marriage will give General Convention occasion to revise the canons and Prayer Book such that straight and gay couples become equal before the altar. In other churches, homologous processes are likely to reach a similar end sooner or later. The UUA's policy on “holy unions” makes an interesting analogy in a non-sacramental setting. Various articulations of the relation between state and sacramental marriage are possible, all of which have recently had constituencies within the church among supporters of marriage equality. When the state is unsupportive, some advocates have urged it to “get out of the marriage business” and institute “civil unions for all”, leaving marriage to the churches. When the state is supportive and the

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church seems less so, the option of “blessing for everybody” becomes more attractive—the latter position having some support, especially among those who find the new blessing rite to be better-adapted to contemporary marriage than the 1979 texts. A telling anecdote: In late 2011, after New York State established marriage equality, then-Bishop of New York Mark Sisk forbade his clergy to sign marriage paperwork for same-sex couples, lest it give offense to the wider church. He likewise ordered gay clergy to civilly marry their domestic partners and seek church blessing on their unions—for the same reason. The drive to respectability, however defined, has its own power in marital matters, especially within the church. I expect that forthcoming debates over the relation of sacramental to civil marriage on the one hand and to blessing on the other will be governed by that drive first of all. The languages of blessing and citizenship may seem disjunct, derived as they are from Biblical narrative and liturgical practice on the one hand, and from the politics of modern liberal democracy on the other. To respond to the church's objection, a theology of blessing must

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be able to think them together: Blessing must not erase the obligations and protections of full citizenship in both the polis and the basileia. Thinking both forms of politeuma together, in turn, requires an answer to weighty objections, especially from postliberals, to Anglican Erastianism. The church's intuition is correct that marriage, as a thisworldly sacrament, is bound up with citizenship in the polis and thus with the liberal rights regime. The liturgical postliberals are likewise correct that Biblical apocalyptic, as liturgically enacted in the eucharist, relativizes the polis to the basileia. The blessing of unions, in fact, raises precisely this disjunction. It invokes the eschatological horizon of Biblical blessing without explicit reference to the polis. It is suggestive on this point that each blessing of a same-sex union I know of in the communities named above has either immediately followed a parish eucharist or concluded with a eucharistic celebration in its own right. With respect to the polis, a blessing will often reflect second-class citizenship; with respect to the basileia, its function is to deny it. Such blessings therefore function pastorally in the basileia and prophetically in the polis, whereas marriage is

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properly a pastoral rite in both settings. This would apply both to same-sex couples and to economically marginal couples, as in the case above.

V. The Agent of Blessing [Genre: Theology proper, especially pneumatology] Who blesses, I am often asked—God, the priest, the church? Westermann 1978 suggests that blessing is a constant, immanent activity of God in creation, with the church's role being a naming and affirmation of the same. The model is that of proclamation rather than speech-act. Frettlöh 2005, enlarging on Westermann, models churchly blessing as a participation in and repetition of God's blessing of creation in the first Genesis account, understood providentially. I essentially concur with these (very Protestant, very Lutheran, very Christocentric) accounts, but I would propose an additional pneumatological emphasis. Ecumenical eucharistic theology tends to be Christological at its core, with an important but logically secondary role for the Holy Spirit; the formulas of both eucharistic and marriage

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services bear this out. Para-sacramental blessings, I would suggest, may be fruitfully modeled as a pneumatological extension of the sacrament's Christological event—perhaps (I will not be held to this just yet) as a procession. I ground this claim in Nicene and especially Cappadocian pneumatology, which proceeds along a Christological logic of divinization but with a distinct application to the particular life of communities. To the extent that modern pneumatologies have tended to emphasize the Holy Spirit's immanent works, this is already in keeping with Westermann. My divergent emphasis would be upon the Church's gift of pronouncing that blessing and rightful confidence in the Spirit's affirmative response, by analogy to the eucharistic epiclesis. The point is not to control the Holy Spirit, but to join in the Spirit's life. My inspiration here is, again, Origen, for whom the Holy Spirit is at work in the whole world leading reason into truth, and in turn to the Church where the Truth is embodied. The movement of blessing from God through Abraham to the nations is mirrored by the Holy Spirit's work in the world, bringing it before Christ, who in turn offers all things to

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the Father. Origen does not make explicit the connection between his Genesis exegesis and his account of the Trinity, but the common logic is there. Particularity and universality are not set up as opposites or paradox, but as an opportunity for procession (in a looser sense). Coakley's recent reading of the Holy Spirit's role in sparking and purifying human desire is likewise overtly Origenistic, and especially provocative in the marital context. (My argument, it will be noted, has largely sidestepped desire and indeed sex as such, aside from an excursus on monogamy; I am grateful to leave eros in such capable, other hands, for the time being.) What I most want to draw from Coakley here is what she shares with Rogers, namely a sense of the Holy Spirit's role as friend to matter and thus a fortiori to the nations. The eschatological core of blessing is hidden: It tends, we hope, to lead unto sacrament, even as the Spirit prepares the believer for Christ. To return, then, to the question of agency: The priest blesses, on behalf of the church, which invokes the Holy Spirit to lead the blessed to the Son and thence to the Father.

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