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Seized by the Spirit 227

necessity such a claim neatly assigns divine origins to all worldly property
while rendering the squatters’ rights to whatever they seize ever more unas-
sailable. After all, if it is the Divine owner himself who hands something
to me, a member of the community of the chosen, is then not such a thing
mine—at least in trust? What could be a more compelling property right
than one that originates in such a direct heavenly transmission from God
2
to his People and away from the undeserving? Given such premises, it is
no wonder that the Pentecostal squatters inhabit a thoroughly miraculous
economy, a sort of parallel universe where all sorts of portentous signs—
from dreams, to uncanny voices and visions—impinge on believers as so
many divine injunctions continuously tell them what to do. 3
That it is a matter of doing, of a supremely action-oriented deity seizing
across history His very own spatiotemporal creation through the agency of
His third person Trinity filling like electricity the bodies of the faithful—
the squatters speak of themselves as “vessels” to be filled by Spirit—should
be clear from my second, final example. One day as I was driving Hermana
4
Juana, the squatters’ irresistibly charismatic leader, through the streets of
Caracas, suddenly she turned away from the empty buildings she had been
gazing at through her window and, briefly catching my eye, said: “You
know, if we do not occupy spaces we do not receive blessings from the Holy
Spirit.” What better indication of a divinely inspired logic of spatial occu-
pation spiraling out of all possible control in a limitless series of seizures,
acts of more or less violent appropriation, to which there is no foreseeable
limit? Does not this statement insinuate a religiously imbued, unbridled
logic of consumption that posits the space of the city, the nation, and even
the world as fair game, an ever-expanding field for this logic’s limitless self-
extension? Lest anyone find fault with mentioning the Holy Ghost and
such logic of spatial occupation in the same breath, so to speak, let me say
that none other than Hegel himself once spoke of the relation between the
three persons of the Trinity as the mode whereby God dialectically seizes
or spatiotemporally takes hold of his own creation across history. Thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis: according to Hegel it is through these persons’
interactions that God self-relates by constantly bringing back to Himself,
the originating source of all things, His own creation that had become

detached from Him throughout history. 5
If the Holy Ghosts’ ongoing, active reclamation, for and on behalf of
God, of the spaces of His own creation may be characterized as limitless,
then this is due to the limitlessness of the spatiotemporal flight whereby,
since the Fall and on account of their sinfulness, men and women detach
the world away from the Father. Ultimately extending to the whole of cre-
ation, it is due to such a postlapsarian metonymic flight from one object
and space to the next that the third person Trinity has His task cut out for