Our God is a Living God," or "We do not believe in God, we believe God." The Pentecostal squatters in Venezuela's capital city, Caracas, among whom I have recently done fieldwork, voice these and other related statements on the most varied occasions, often to distinguish their own brand of spirituality from that of other religious communities across Venezuela. Although I originally found what the squatters said somewhat puzzling, their statements soon began to resonate powerfully with what I had first observed during the initial moments of fieldwork, namely, the strange (at least to me), unexpected spectacle of these squatters illegally occupying — in the name, and on the behalf, of the Holy Ghost — an empty twelve-story building located in what was once a relatively posh, bohemian part of the city now teeming with informal commerce and all sorts of criminality.

A few initial encounters with the squatters sufficed for me to grasp the connection between the squatters' phenomenal spatial avarice and the notion of a "living God" instantaneously conveying His dictates to His squatter-people. This is a God, moreover, that one does not so much believe in, as if He was forever installed in some distant, invisible realm mediated by some visible image or authority. Rather, one believes Him as much as one believes or ought to believe a figure of authority who in the here and now tells you what to expect and what to do. It became clear to me after some probing that the Pentecostal squatters assert you must "believe God" simply because He, as a living, present deity, addresses you right now as a believer who, as such, is part of the community of the chosen. Therefore, according to the Pentecostal squatters, you had better not merely believe in Him but believe Him, paying close attention to all that He tells you in the very moment that He speaks and you hear Him. In this essay, I hope to make clear that, at least in Venezuela, much of Pentecostal spirituality is precisely about obliterating the gap between God and His own creation so that, presumably, representation may give way to forms of religious presencing pregnant with all sorts of far-reaching, devastatingly efficacious worldly social and cultural effects.¹ For now, however, I want simply to note that, given the connection between the squatters' spirituality and their spatial orientations, it is not all that surprising that the image of a hungry Holy Ghost gobbling vast stretches of the cityscape by means of the squatters' docile agency eventually seized my imagination. Such a ghostly apparition presides over much of what I write here.

Spirit Seizures

I credit the rapidity with which I gained some preliminary insight into the squatters' behavior to the very insistence with which they accounted for their actions in terms of the Holy Spirit's agency. I will say more about the link between the Venezuelan squatters' aggressive spatial practices and the kind of Trinitarian theology favored by a majority of Pentecostals around the world,² exploring in greater detail what becomes of this sectarian Ghost as He moves south of the border into the messy bowels of a huge South American city. Before this, however, a few examples will suffice to give an idea of the extent to which it is the Pentecostal squatters themselves who reflexively assume the link between the Holy Ghost's innermost designs and their own spatial agency.

One inheres in the insistence with which the squatters legitimate their illegal operations through appeal to transcendental grounds, claiming that whatever they seize — from material goods to buildings and commercial establishments — is theirs "because God has given it to us." I cannot think of any more effective means of circumventing earthly property rights than the claim, drawn from the Bible, that "God is the owner of the entire world's silver and gold." Voiced constantly by the squatters, especially whenever it is a matter of asserting their rights to something, with syllogistic necessity such a claim neatly assigns divine origins to all worldly property while rendering the squatters' rights to whatever they seize ever more unassailable. 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 to His People and away from the undeserving?³ 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 telling them what to do.⁴

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 thirdperson 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, of a reflexively assumed link between the squatters' own spatial agency and the intimations of Spirit. One day as I was driving Hermana Juana,⁵ the squatters' irresistibly charismatic leader, through the streets of Caracas, she suddenly turned away from the empty buildings she had been gazing at through her window and directed her attention to me: "You know," she said, briefly catching my eye, "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 occupation 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.⁶

If the Holy Ghost's 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 creation, it is due to such a postlapsarian metonymic flight from one object and space to the next that the thirdperson Trinity has His task cut out for Him. Faced with such a predicament, Spirit, in other words, cannot but intervene in the world or, what comes to the same, in the spatiotemporal manifold so as to constantly reclaim and return it to its originating source and foundation.

To gain a sense of Pentecostal spirituality's peculiar spatiotemporal drive, it is enough to turn briefly to the images shown on the huge projection screens found in Pentecostal churches all over the world. In particular, I am thinking of a film that I saw during services in places as distant from each other as Indonesia and Venezuela, which is suggestive of how globalized the Pentecostal repertoire and institutional reach is. Bathed in supernatural light, the film shows a series of heterogeneous landscapes caught in rapid succession by a traveling shot that swiftly moves forward, landscape upon disappearing landscape, into an infinitely expanding horizon. Meanwhile, the voice-over somehow manages to suture the Holy Spirit to the moving eye of the camera, thereby generating the impression of a disembodied supernatural agency smoothly yet relentlessly taking over the whole of the planet from above. Needless to say, widely celebrated in Pentecostal services everywhere, the wonders of digital and electronic technologies are not at all foreign to this effect of a limitless spatiotemporal seizure.

It is on account of instances like these, what the squatters themselves say on the most varied occasions, and, last but not least, the kind of Trinitarian theology espoused by a majority of Pentecostals everywhere (with its ever-present temptation to compress the three Divine Persons into the Oneness of Christ as an all-powerful, absolute agency continuously active in the world) that I refer to the Holy Spirit's repeated interventions as unlimited forms of spatial occupation. In referring to them as such, I believe that I remain faithful to this Ghost's innermost designs and intentions. After all, much as in the films that I have just evoked, in what amounts to a kind of squatting, what is involved in these interventions is nothing less than the seizing or occupying and taking back, one by one if necessary, of those spatiotemporal chunks of creation that sinfulness keeps snatching away.