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Title: The Prodigal Returns
Author: Lilian Staveley
Release Date: July 18, 2009 [EBook #29450]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRODIGAL RETURNS ***
Produced by Ruth Hart
THE PRODIGAL RETURNS
By
Lilian Staveley
The Author of "The Golden Fountain" and "The Romance of the
Soul"
London
John M. Watkins
21 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, W.C. 2
1921
CONTENTS
Part I. 7
Part II. 63
Part III. 81
Part IV. 102
Part V. 151
PART I
Sunshine and a garden path . . . flowers . . . the face and neck and
bosom of the nurse upon whose heart I lay, and her voice telling me
that she must leave me, that we must part, and immediately after
anguish--blotting out the sunshine, the flowers, the face, the voice.
This is my first recollection of Life--the pain of love. I was two
years old.
Nothing more for two years--and then the picture of a pond and my
baby brother floating on it, whilst with agonised hands I seized his
small white coat and held him fast.
And then a meadow full of long, deep grass and summer flowers,
and I--industriously picking buttercups into a tiny petticoat to take to
cook, "to make the butter with," I said.
And then a table spread for tea. Our nurses, my two brothers, and
myself. Angry words and screaming baby voices, a knife thrown by
my little brother. Rage and hate.
And then a wedding, and I a bridesmaid, aged five years--the church,
the altar, and great awe, and afterwards a long white table, white
flowers, and a white Bride. Grown men on either side of
me--smilingly delightful, tempting me with sweets and cakes and wine,
and a new strange interest rising in me like a little flood of
exultation--the joy of the world, and the first faint breath of the
mystery of sex.
Then came winters of travel. Sunshine and mimosa, olive trees
against an azure sky. Climbing winding, stony paths between green
terraces, tulips and anemones and vines; white sunny walls and
lizards; green frogs and deep wells fringed around with maidenhair.
Mountains and a sea of lapis blue, and early in the mornings from
this lapis lake a great red sun would rise upon a sky of molten gold.
In the rooms so near me were my darling brothers, from whom I
often had to part. Beauty and Joy, and Love and Pain--these made
up life.
At ten I twice narrowly escaped death. From Paris we were to take
the second or later half of the train to Marseilles. Late the night
before my father suddenly said, "I have changed my mind; I feel we
must go by the first train." This was with some difficulty arranged.
On reaching an immense bridge across a deep ravine I suddenly
became acutely aware that the bridge was about to give way. In a
terrible state of alarm I called out this fearful fact to my family. I
burst into tears. I suffered agonies. My mother scolded me, and
when we safely reached the other side of the bridge I was severely
taken to task for my behaviour. The bridge broke with the next train
over it--the train in which we should have been. Some four hundred
people perished. It was the most terrible railway disaster that had
ever occurred in France.
A few weeks later, death came nearer still. Having escaped from our
tutor, with a party of other children we ran to two great reservoirs to
fish for frogs. Laughing and talking and full of childish joy, we
fished there for an hour, when all at once I was impelled, under an
extraordinary sense of pressure, to call out, "If anyone falls into the
water, no one must jump in to save them, but must immediately run
to those long sticks" (I had never noticed them until I spoke) "and
draw one out and hold it to whoever has fallen in." I spoke
automatically, and felt as much surprised as my companions that I
should speak of such a thing.
Within five minutes I had fallen in myself. My brother remembered
my words, but before he could reach me with the stick I was under
the water for the third and last time. It was all that they could do to
drag my weight up to the ledge, for the water was a yard below it.
Had my brother jumped in, as he said he most surely would have
done had I not forewarned him, we must both have been drowned,
for they would have had neither the strength nor the time to pull us
both out alive. I was not at all frightened or upset till I heard
someone say that I was dead; then I wept--it was so sad to be dead!
The pressure put upon me to speak as I did had been so great that I
have never forgotten the strange impression of it to this day. On both
these occasions I consider that I was under immediate Divine
protection.
I believed earnestly in God with the complete and peaceful faith of
childhood. I thought of Him, and was afraid: but more afraid of a
great Angel who stood with pen and book in hand and wrote down
all my sins. This terrible Angel was a great reality to me. I prayed
diligently for those I loved. Sometimes I forgot a name: then I would
have to get out of bed and add it to my prayer. As I grew older, if the
weather were cold I did not pray upon the floor but from my bed,
because it was more comfortable. I was not always sure if this were
quite right, but I could not concentrate my mind on God if my body
was cold, because then I could not forget my body.
I saw God very plainly when I shut my eyes! He was a White Figure
in white robes on a white throne, amongst the clouds. He heard my
prayers as easily as I saw His robes. He was by no means very far
away, though sometimes He was further than at others. He took the
trouble to make everything very beautiful: and He could not bear
sinful children. The Angel with the Book read out to Him my faults
in the evenings.
When I was twelve years old my grandmother died, and for three
months I was in real grief. All day I mourned for her, and at night I
looked out at the stars, and the terrible mystery of death and space
and loneliness struck at my childish heart.
After thirteen I could no longer be taken abroad to hotels, for my
parents considered that I received too much attention, too many
presents, too many chocolates from men. I was educated by a
governess, and was often very lonely. My brothers would come back
from school; then I overflowed with happiness and sang all day long
in my heart with joy. The last night of the holidays was a time of
anguish. Upstairs the clothes were packed. Downstairs I helped them
pack the "play-boxes," square deal boxes at sight of which tears
sprang to my eyes and a dreadful pain gripped my heart. Oh, the
pain of love at parting! there never was a pain so terrible as suffering
love. The last meal: the last hour: the last look. There are natures
which feel this anguish more than others. We are not all alike.
I had been passionately fond of dolls. Now I was too old for such
companions, and when my brothers went away I was completely
alone with my governess and my lessons. I fell into the habit of
dreaming. In these dreams I evolved a companion who was at the
same time myself--and yet not an ordinary little girl like myself, but
a marvellous creature of unlimited possibilities and virtues. She
even had wings and flew with such ease from the tops of the highest
buildings, and floated so delightfully over my favourite fields and
brooks that I found it hard to believe that I myself did not actually
fly. What glorious things we did together, what courage we had,
nothing daunted us! I cared very little to read books of adventure,
for our own adventures were more wonderful than anything I ever
read.
Not only had I wings, but when I was my other self I was extremely
good, and the Angel with the Book was then never able to make a
single adverse record of me. And then how easy it was to be good:
how delightful, no difficulties whatever! As we both grew older the
actual wings were folded up and put away. The virtues remained,
but we led an intensely interesting life, and a certain high standard
of life was evolved which was afterwards useful to me.
When, later on, I grew up and my parents allowed me to have as
many friends as I wanted, and when I became exceedingly gay, I
still retained the habit of this double existence; it remained with me
even after my marriage and kept me out of mischief. If I found
myself temporarily dull or in some place I did not care for, clothed
in the body of my double, like the wind, I went where I listed. I
would go to balls and parties, or with equal ease visit the mountains
and watch the sunset or the incomparable beauties of dawn, making
delicate excursions into the strange, the wonderful, and the sublime.
I gathered crystal flowers in invisible worlds, and the scent of those
flowers was Romance.
All this vivid imagination sometimes made my mind over-active: I
could not sleep. "Count sheep jumping over a hurdle," I was advised.
But it did not answer. I found the most effective way was to think
seriously of my worst sins--my mind immediately slowed down,
became a discreet blank--I slept!
I grew tall and healthy. At sixteen I received my first offer of
marriage and with it my first vision of the love and passion of men. I
recoiled from it with great shyness and aversion. Yet I became
deeply interested in men, and remained so for very many years.
From that time on I never was without a lover till my marriage.
II
At seventeen my "lessons" came to an end. I had not learnt much,
but I could speak four languages with great fluency. I learnt perhaps
more from listening to the conversation of my father and his friends.
He had always been a man of leisure and was acquainted with many
of the interesting and celebrated people of the day, both in England
and on the Continent. I was devoted to him, and whenever he guided
my character he did so with the greatest judgment. He taught me
above all things the need of self-control, and never to make a remark
of a fellow-creature unless I had something pleasant or kind to say.
There was no subject upon which he was unread; and when my
brothers, who were both exceedingly clever, returned from college
and the University, wonderful and brilliant were the discussions that
went on. Both my parents were of Huguenot descent, belonging to
the old French noblesse. I think the Latin blood had sharpened their
brains, and certainly gave an extra zest to life.
My father was a great believer in heredity, and the following
personal experience may show him somewhat justified in his belief.
In quite early childhood I commenced to feel a preference for the
_left_ side of my body: I washed, dried, and dressed the left side
first; I preserved it carefully from all harm; I kept it warm. I was,
comparatively speaking, totally indifferent to my right side.
As I grew older I observed that the place of honour was upon the
right-hand side: I understood that God had made the world and ruled
it with His right hand! I was wrong, then, in preferring my left hand.
I determined to change over. It was very difficult to do: so deep was
the instinct that it took me some years to eradicate the love for my
left side and transfer it to my right, and when I had at last
accomplished it I was still liable to go back to my first preference.
No one ever detected my peculiarity.
I was already eighteen or nineteen years old when one day I entered
my father's room, ready dressed to go out. I had on both my gloves.
Suddenly I remembered that I had put on my left glove first.
Immediately I took off both my gloves--then I replaced the right one,
and then the left. My father was watching me and asked me for an
explanation. I gave it him, and he looked very grave, almost alarmed.
After a moment of silence he said, "I want you to give that habit up--I
want you to break yourself of it immediately. I had it myself as a
youth: it took me years to conquer. No one should permit himself to
be the slave of _any_ habit."
I asked him which side he had loved. "The _left_ side," he said. At
five-and-twenty he had conquered the habit, and I was not born till
he was almost sixty-one! yet I had inherited it. We never referred to
it again, and in two years I, also, had conquered it.
We spent the winter of the year in which I was seventeen in Italy, to
which country a near relative was Ambassador, and there I went to
my first ball. That night--and how often afterwards!--I knew the
surging exultation, the intoxication of the joy of life. How often in
social life, in brilliant scenes of light and laughter, music and love, I
seemed to ride on the crest of a wave, in the marvellous glamour of
youth!
This love of the world and of social life was a very strong feeling for
many years: at the same time and running, as it were, in double
harness with it was a necessity for solitude. My mind imperatively
demanded this, and indeed my heart too.
It was during this year that I first commenced a new form of mental
pleasure through looking at the beautiful in Nature. Not only
solitude, but total silence was necessary for this pastime, and, if
possible, beauty and a distant view: failing a view I could
accomplish it by means of the beauties of the sky. This form of
mental pleasure was the exact opposite of my previous dreamings,
for all imagination absolutely ceased, all forms, all pictures, all
activities disappeared--the very scene at which I looked had to
vanish before I could know the pleasure of this occupation in which,
in some mysterious manner, I inhaled the very essence of the
Beautiful.
At first I was only able to remain in this condition for a few
moments at a time, but that satisfied me--or, rather, did not satisfy
me, for through it all ran a strange unaccountable anguish--a pain of
longing--which, like a high, fine, tremulous nerve, ran through the
joy. What induced me to pursue this habit, I never asked myself.
That it was a form of the spirit's struggle towards the Eternal--of the
soul's great quest of God--never occurred to me. I was worshipping
the Beautiful without giving sufficient thought to Him from Whom
all beauty proceeds. Half a lifetime was to go by before I realised to
what this habit was leading me--that it was the first step towards the
acquirement of that most exquisite of all blessings--the gift of the
Contemplation of God. Ah, if anyone knows in his heart the call of
the Beautiful, let him use it towards this glorious end! Love, and the
Beautiful--these are the twin golden paths that lead us all to God.
III
Certainly we were not a religious family. One attendance at church
upon Sunday--if it did not rain!--and occasionally the Communion,
this was the extent of any outward religious feeling. But my father's
daily life and acts were full of Christianity. A man of a naturally
somewhat violent temper, he had so brought himself under control
that towards everyone, high and low, he had become all that was
sweet and patient, sympathetic and gentle.
About this time a devouring curiosity for knowledge commenced to
possess me. What was the truth--what was the truth about every
single thing I saw? Astronomy, Biology, Geology--in these things I
discovered a new and marvellous interest: here at last I found my
natural bent. History had small attraction for me: it spoke of the
doings of people mostly vain or cruel, and untruthful. I wanted
truth--irrefutable facts! No scientific work seemed too difficult for me;
but I never, then or later, read anything upon the subject of religion,
philosophy, or psychology. I had a healthy, wholesome young
intelligence with a voracious appetite: it would carry me a long way,
I thought. It did--it landed me in Atheism.
To a woman Atheism is intolerable pain: her very nature, loving,
tender, sensitive, clinging, demands belief in God. The high moral
standard demanded of her is impossible of fulfilment for mere
reasons of race-welfare. The personal reason, the Personal
God--these are essential to high virtue. Young as I was, I realised this.
Outwardly I was frivolous; inwardly I was no butterfly, the deep
things of my nature were by no means unknown to me. I not only
became profoundly unrestful at heart but I was fearful for myself,
and of where strong forces of which I felt the pull might lead me. I
had great power over the emotions of men: moreover, interests and
instincts within me corresponded to this dangerous capacity. I felt
that the world held many strange fires: some holy and beautiful;
some far otherwise.
Without God I knew myself incapable of overcoming the evil of the
world, or even of my own petty nature and entanglements. I
despaired, for I perceived that God does not reveal Himself because
of an imperious demand of the human mind, and I had yet to learn
that those mysteries which are under lock and key to the intelligence
are open to the heart and soul. But indeed there was no God to
reveal Himself. All was a fantastic make-believe! a pitiful childish
invention and illusion!
My intelligence said, "Resign yourself to what is, after all, the truth:
console yourself with the world and material achievements." The
heart said, "Resignation is impossible, for there is no consolation to
the heart without God." I listened to my heart rather than my
intelligence, and for two terrible years I fought for faith. I was
always reserved, and never admitted anyone into the deep things of
my life--but when I was twenty my father perceived that I was going
through some inward crisis. He knew the books that I read, and
probably guessed what had happened to me. At any rate he called
me into his room one day and asked me, out of love and obedience
to himself, to give up reading all science. This was an overwhelming
blow to me: yet I loved him dearly, and had never disobeyed him in
my life. Again I let my heart speak; and I sacrificed my mind and
my books.
I threw myself now more than ever into social amusements, and in
my solitary hours sought consolation in my "dream-life." I was
afraid to turn to the love of Nature--to my beautiful pastime,--for the
pain in it was unbearable.
Towards the end of two years my struggles for faith commenced to
find a reward. Little by little a faint hope crept into my mind--fragile,
often imperceptible. A questioning remark made by my younger
brother helped me: "If human life is entirely material and a
part of Nature only, then what becomes of human thoughts and
aspirations?" Science had proved to me that nothing is lost--but has
a destiny--in that it evolves into another form or condition of activity.
Evolution! with its many seeming contradictions to Religion--might
it not be merely a strong light, too strong as yet for my weak mind,
blinding me into temporary darkness? What raised Man above the
beasts but his thoughts and aspirations; and if even a grain of dust
were imperishable, were these thoughts and aspirations of Man
alone to end in nothing--to be lost! It was but a reasonable inference
to say No. These invisible thoughts and aspirations have also a
future--a destiny in a, to us, still invisible world--in the Life of the
Spirit. To this my mind was able to agree. It was a step. In the realm
of Ideal Thought I might find again my Faith. I had indeed been
foolish to suppose that a system which provided for the continuation
of a grain of sand should overlook the Spirit of Man. This was
presupposing the existence of a spirit in Man; but who could be
found to truly and reasonably hold that the mysterious high and
soaring thoughts of Man were one and the same thing as mere
animalism? they were too obviously of another nature to the merely
bovine, to the solids of the flesh: for one thing, they were free of the
law of gravity which so entirely overrules the rest of Nature--they
must therefore come to their destiny in another world, another
condition of consciousness.
IV
That winter we again spent in Italy, in continuous gaiety amongst a
brilliant cosmopolitan world of men and women who for the most
part lived in palaces, surrounded with art and luxury. Here in Rome
on every side was to be found the Cult of the Beautiful. Wonderful
temples, gems of classical sculpture, masterpieces of colour in oil
and fresco--the genius and the aspirations of men rendered
permanent for us by Art; but the Temples, those silent emblems of
man's worship of an Unknown God, with their surroundings of
lovely nature, affected me far the most deeply: indeed, I do not
pretend that sculptures and pictures affected me at all. I was
interested, I greatly admired--they were a part of education, but that
was all. But in the vicinity of those Temples what strange echoes
awoke in me, what mysterious sadness and longing, what a mystery
of pain! Something within me sighed and moaned for God. If I could
but find Him--if I could even truly Believe and be at peace! But
already I had commenced to Believe.
During the late winter we went to one of the great ceremonies at the
Vatican: we had seats in the Sistine Chapel. It was an especial
occasion, and the number of persons present was beyond all seating
accommodation. To make way for someone of importance I was
asked to give up my seat and go outside into the body of the great
Cathedral; here I was hurriedly pushed into the second row of a
huge concourse of waiting and standing people. Already in the
distance the Pope was approaching. Lifted high in his chair on the
shoulders of his bearers, he came slowly along in his white robes,
his hand raised in a general blessing upon all this multitude. As he
came nearer I saw the delicate ivory face--the great dark eyes
shining with a fire I had never seen before. For the first time in my
life I saw holiness. I was moved to the depths of my being.
Something in my gaze arrested his attention; he had his chair
stopped immediately above me, and, leaning over me, he blessed me
individually--a very great concession during a large public
ceremony. I ought to have gone down on my knees--but I had no
knees! I no longer had a body! There was no longer anything
anywhere in the world but Holiness--and my enraptured soul.
Holiness, then, was far beyond the Beautiful. I had not known this
till I saw it before me.
Life hurried me on: glowing hours and months succeeded each other.
In the autumn I fell in love. I came to the consciousness of this, not
gradually, but all in one instant. I had no chance of drawing back,
for it was already fully completed before I realised it. I came to the
realisation of it through a dream (sleep-dreams were always
exceedingly rare with me): on this occasion I dreamed a friend
showed me the picture of a girl to whom she said this lover (he had
been my lover for a year) was engaged. I awoke, sobbing with
anguish. I could not disguise from myself the fact that I must be in
love. When the time came to speak of it to my parents, my mother
would not hear of the marriage--there was no money: I must make
another choice. Two brilliant opportunities offered
themselves--money--position; but I could not bring myself to think of
either. Love was everything: a prolonged secret engagement followed. I
went into Society just as before. At this time an aptitude for
"fortune-telling" showed itself: it amused my friends--I told fortunes
both by palmistry, which I studied quite seriously, and by cards.
With both I went largely by inspiration. I found this "inspiration"
varied with the individual. There were many persons to whom I
could give the most extraordinarily accurate details of past, present,
and future; others moderately so; others were a total blank, in which
case I either had to remain silent or "try to make up." I got such a
reputation for this--I was so sought after for it by even total
strangers--that in a couple of years I pushed it all far away from me
as an intolerable nuisance.
V
The Faith that had been growing up in me was of a very different
form from that which I had had before: wider, purer, infinitely more
powerful, and, though I did not like to remember the pain of them, I
felt that those struggling years of doubt and negation had been worth
while--without those struggles I felt I never could have had so
powerful a faith as I now had. God was at an indefinite and infinite
distance, but His Existence was a thing of complete certainty for me.
Of the mode and means of Connection with Him I had no smallest
knowledge or even conception. I addressed Him with words from
the brain and the lips. An insuperable wall perpetually separated me
from Him.
Now my father became ill with heart trouble. Doctors, nurses, all the
dreaded paraphernalia of sickness pervaded the house. During two
terrible years he lingered on. Heart-broken at the sight of his
sufferings, I hardly left his bedside. Finally death released him. But
my health, which had always been good, was now completely
broken down; I became a semi-invalid, always suffering, too
delicate to marry. Under pressure of this continued wretchedness I
sank into a nerveless condition of mere dumb endurance--a passive
acceptance of the miseries of life "as willed by God," I assured
myself.
I entered a stagnant state of _mere_ resignation, whereas
accompanying the resignation there should have been a forward-piercing
endeavour to reach out and attain a higher spiritual level through
Jesus Christ: a persistent effort to light my lamp at the
Spiritual Flame to which each must _bring his own lamp,_ for it is
not lit for him by the mere outward ceremony of Baptism--that
ceremony is but the Invitation to come to the Light: for each one
individually, _in full consciousness of desire,_ that lighting must be
obtained from the Saviour. I had not obtained this light. I did not
comprehend that it was necessary. I understood nothing; I
was a spiritual savage. Vague, miserable thoughts, gloomy
self-introspections, merely fatigue the vitality without assisting the
soul. What is required is a persistent endeavour to establish an inwardly
felt relationship first to the Man Jesus. His Personality, His
Characteristics are to be drawn into the secret places of the heart by
means of the natural sympathy which plays between two hearts that
both know love and suffering, and hope and dejection. Sympathy
established--love will soon follow. Later, an iron energy to
overcome will be required. The supreme necessity of the soul before
being filled with love is to maintain the will of the whole spiritual
being in conformity with the Will of God. In the achievement of this
she is under incessant assistance: in fact everything in the spiritual
life is a gift--as in the physical: for who can produce his own sight
or his own growth? In the physical these are automatic--in the
spiritual they are accomplished only, as it were, "by request," and
this request a deep all-pervading desire.
We cannot of our own will climb the spiritual heights, neither can
we climb them without using our will. It is Will flowing towards
Will which carries us by the power of Jesus Christ to the Goal.
VI
With recovered health, I married, and knew great happiness; but as a
bride of four months I had to part from my husband, who went to the
South African War. Always, always this terrible pain of love that
must part. Always it was love that seemed to me the most beautiful
thing in life, and always it was love that hurt me most. He was away
for fifteen months. I made no spiritual advance whatever. Mystified
by so much pain, I now began to regard God if not as the actual
Author of all pain, at any rate as the Permitter of all pain. More and
more I fell back in alarm at the discovery of the depths of my own
capacities for suffering. A tremendous fear of God now commenced
to grow up in me, which so increased that after a few years I listened
with astonishment when I heard people say they were afraid of
_any_ person, even a burglar! I could no longer understand feeling
fear for anyone or anything save God. All my actions were now
governed solely by this sense of weighty, immediate fear of Him.
This continued for some ten years.
When my husband at last returned from the War we took up again
our happy married life, and we lived together without a cross word,
in a wonderful world of our own, as lovers do. It was remarkable
that we were so happy, for we had no interests in common. My
husband loved all sports and all games, whereas interest in those
things was frankly incomprehensible to me. In the winter, when he
was out in the hunting-field, I spent much time by myself; but I was
never dull, for I could walk out amongst Nature and indulge in my
pastime, if the weather were fine: and if not, I could observe and
admire everything that grew and lived close at hand in the
hedgerows and fields, and I would work for hours with my needle,
for then I could think; I worked hard in the garden.
A dreadful question now often presented itself to me: Had I really a
soul at all, or was I merely a passing shadow, here momentarily for
God's amusement? If I had an eternal soul, where did it live--in my
head with my brain as a higher part of my mind?
Men had souls, I was sure of that; and they asserted the possession
of them very positively--but women? I understood Mahomed
grudgingly granted them a half-soul, and that only conditionally.
Scriptures spoke harshly of women; Paul was bitter against them; all
the sins and troubles of the world were laid upon their delicate and
beautiful shoulders. In Revelation I found no mention whatever of
Woman in the life of the Resurrection.
All this hurt me. What profound injustice--to suffer so much and to
receive no recognition whatever whilst men walked off with all the
joys after leading very questionable lives! Why continue to struggle
to please God when His interest in me would so soon be over? I
went through very real and great spiritual sufferings, and
temptations to throw myself again solely into world-interests, to
console myself with the here and now, for I had the means: it was all
to my hand. I swayed to and fro: at one time I felt very hard towards
God, terribly hurt by this love-betrayal. But when I looked at the
beauties of Nature and the glories of that endless sky, ah, my heart
melted with tenderness and admiration for the marvellous Maker of
it all. Truly, He was worthy of any sacrifice upon my part. If my
poor, tiny, suffering life afforded Him amusement, I was willing to
have it so. After all--for what wretched, ugly, and miserable men
women frequently sacrificed themselves without getting any other
reward for it than neglect and indifference. How much better to
sacrifice oneself to the All-Perfect, All-Beautiful God!
I finally resigned myself entirely and completely to this point of
view, and, having done so, I thus addressed, in all reverence and
earnestness, the Deity:--
"Almighty God, if it is Thy Will to blot out Woman from Paradise I
most humbly assure Thee of this--Man will miss her sorely; and
Thou Thyself, Almighty God, when Thou dost visit Paradise, wilt
miss her also!"
After this I seldom said any private prayers, for I was not of the
Acceptable Sex. But I paid a public respect to God in the church,
where I worshipped Him with profound reverence and great sadness.
But I thought of Him in my heart constantly, with all those tender,
loving, longing thoughts which are the heart's bouquet held out to
God.
Happiness for me, then, must be found entirely in this world, and I
found it in my love for my husband. Happiness was that which the
whole world was looking for; but I could not fail to notice more and
more the ridiculous picture presented by Society in its pretences of
being the means of finding this happiness. None of its ardent
devotees were "happy" people; they were excited, egotistical,
intensely vain and selfish, often bitter and disappointed, filled with a
demon of competition, jealous, and full of empty, insincere smiles. I
perceived the chagrins from which they secretly suffered--the tears
behind the laughter. I was not in the least deceived or impressed by
any of them, but wondered how they managed to hang together and
deceive each other. More and more I looked for purely mental
pleasures. Mind was everything. I now began to despise my body--I
almost hated it as an incubus! Social successes or failures grew to be
a matter of complete indifference to me, and social life resolved
itself into being solely the means of bringing mind into contact with
mind. The question of fashionable environment ceased to exist for
me, but the question of how and where to meet with thinking minds
was what concerned me: it was not an easy one to solve in the usual
conditions of country life, with its sports and its human-animal
interests.
Finally, total mental solitude closed around me. In spite of my doubt
as to the existence of a woman-soul, I still felt the same piercing
desire and need for God--the acquisition of knowledge in no way
lessened this pain. What, after all, is knowledge by itself? The light
of the highest human intelligence seems hardly greater than the wan
lamp of a diminutive glow-worm, surrounded by the vastness of the
night. In sorrow, in trouble, in pain, could knowledge or the mind do
so much more for me than the despised body? No, something more
than the intelligence was needed to give life any sense of adequacy:
even human love was insufficient. God Himself was needed, and the
ever-recurring necessity would force itself upon me of the need for a
personal direct connection with God.
I continued to find it utterly impossible to achieve this. Mere faith
by no means fulfilled my requirements. God, then, remained
inaccessible--the mind fell back from every attempt to reach Him.
He was unknowable, yet not unthinkable--that is to say, He was not
unthinkable as Being, but only in particularisation and in realisation.
I could know Him to Be; but in that alone where was any
consolation?--I found it totally inadequate. It was some form of
personal Contact that was needed; but if my mind failed to reach this,
with what else should I reach it? Ah, I was infinitely too small for
this terrible mystery; but, small as I was, how I could suffer! Why
this suffering? Why would He not show Himself? Harsh, rebellious,
criticising thoughts frequently invaded me: the whole scheme of
Nature and of life at times appeared cruel, unreasonably so. All the
old ever-to-be-repeated cycle of bitter human thoughts had to be
gone all through again in my own individual atom. Here and there
the bitterness might vary: as, for instance, the collapse and
corruption of the body with its hideous finale never caused me
distress. I had become too indifferent to the body; but I found that
most persons clung to it with extraordinary tenacity, indeed
appeared to regard it as their most valuable possession! What I did
resent, and was deeply mystified by, was the capacity for suffering
and pain which had no balance in any corresponding joy. It was idle
to say that the joy of festivities, even of human love, equalled the
anguish of grief over others, or the sufferings of physical ill-health.
They did not counterbalance it; sorrow was more weighty than joy,
and far more durable. Later I became convinced that there did exist a
full equivalent of joy, as against pain, and that I merely had no
knowledge of how to find it.
Years succeeded each other in this way, bringing greater loosening
of earth-ties, more abstraction, certainly no improvement of
character.
My husband's duties as a soldier took us to many parts of the world.
During a visit to Africa I was struck by lightning, and for ten days
my sufferings were almost unendurable; every nerve seemed
electrocuted. It was long before I quite recovered. Whilst this illness
lasted, though it caused him no inconvenience and he led his life
exactly as usual, I yet noticed a change in my husband's love. I was
deeply pained, almost horrified, by this revelation of the natural
imperfection of human love: profoundly saddened, I asked myself
was it nothing but lust which had inspired and dictated all the poems
of the world? I thought more and more of Jesus' love; I began to
know that nothing less than His perfect love could satisfy me. In this
illness I was tremendously alone.
VII
I commenced to meditate upon the life and the character and the
love of Jesus Christ. I was now about thirty-six. Gradually He
became for me a secret Mind-Companion. I began to rely upon this
companionship--though it appeared intensely one-sided, for at first it
seemed always to be I who gave! Nevertheless I found a growing
calm arising from this apparently so one-sided friendship. A subtle
assistance and comfort came to me, it was impossible to say how,
yet it came from this companionship as it came from nothing else.
That Jesus Christ was God I knew to be the faith of the Church, but
that He actually was so I felt no conviction of whatever: indeed, it
was incomprehensible to me. I thought of Him as a Perfect Man,
with divine powers. He was my Jesus. I denied nothing, for I was far
too small and ignorant to venture to do so: I kept a perfectly open
mind and loved Him for Himself, as the Man Jesus.
This went on for some years. In all my spiritual advancement I was
incredibly slow!
What had delayed me in progress was lack of using the right
Procedure and the right Prayer. I sought for God with persistence
and great longing; but I sought Him as the Father, and the Godhead
is inaccessible to the creature. On becoming truly desirous of finding
God it is necessary that with great persistence we pray the Father in
the name of Jesus Christ that He will give us to Jesus Christ and nil
the heart and mind with love for Christ. Only through Jesus Christ
can we find the Godhead, and we cannot be satisfied with less than
the Godhead. With the creature we cannot come into contact with
the Godhead--but with the soul only. The soul is awakened, revived,
reglorified by Grace of Jesus Christ; and the Holy Spirit effects the
repentance and conversion of the heart and mind, for without this
conversion towards a spiritual life the soul remains in bondage to the
unconverted creature.
VIII
One day I returned from a walk, and hardly had I entered my room
when I commenced thinking with great nearness and intimacy of
Jesus; and suddenly, with the most intense vividness, He presented
Himself before my consciousness so that I inwardly perceived Him,
and at once I was overcome by a great agony of remorse for my
unworthiness: it was as though my heart and mind broke in pieces
and melted in the stress of this fearful pain, which
continued--increased--became unendurable, and lasted altogether an
hour. Too ignorant to know that this was the pain of Repentance, I
did not understand what had happened to me; but now indeed at least I
knew beyond a doubt that I had a soul! My wonderful Lord had
come to pay me a visit, and I was not fit to receive Him--hence my
agony. I would try with all my strength to improve myself for Him.
I was at first at a standstill to know even where to commence in this
improvement, for words fail to describe what I now saw in myself!
Up till now I had publicly confessed myself a sinner, and privately
calmly thought of myself as a sinner, but without being disturbed by
it or perceiving how I was one! I kept the commandments in the
usual degree and way, and was conscientious in my dealings with
others. Now all at once--by this Presentment of Himself before my
soul--which had lasted for no more than one moment of time--I
suddenly, and with terrible clearness, saw the whole insufferable
offensiveness of myself.
For some time, even for some weeks, I remained like a person
half-stunned with astonishment. Then I determined to try to become less
selfish, less irritable and impatient, to show far more consideration
for everyone else, to be rigidly truthful: in fact, try to commence an
alteration.
For one thing--about telling lies--I had always been quite truthful in
large things, but often told some social lies for my own convenience,
and sometimes told them for no reason at all! This spontaneous Evil
filled me with more astonishment than shame; whence did this Evil
come? I could never account for this strange Intruder which seemed
to have a separate life and will of its own, and which, with no
conscious invitation upon my part, would suddenly visit me! and _in
all manner of shapes and ways!_ But whatever my difficulties, I had
always this immense incentive--to please my Jesus, tender and
wonderful, my Perfect Friend.
Two years went by, and on Easter morning, at the close of the
service as I knelt in prayer in the church, He suddenly presented
Himself again before my soul, and again I saw myself, and again I
went down and down into those terrible abysses of spiritual pain;
and I suffered more than I suffered the first time: indeed, I have
never had the courage to quite fully recall the full depths of this
anguish to mind.
After this my soul knew Jesus as Christ the Son of God, and my
heart and mind accepted this without any further wonder or question,
and entirely without knowing how this knowledge had been given,
for it came as a gift.
A great repose now commenced to fill me, and the world and all its
interests and ways seemed softly and gently blown out of my heart
by the wings of a great new love, my love for the Risen Christ.
Though outwardly my friends might see no change, yet inwardly I
was secretly changing month by month. Even the great love I had
for my husband began to fade: this caused me distress; I thought I
was growing heartless, and yet it was rather that my heart had grown
so large that no man could fill it! I felt within me an immense,
incomprehensible capacity for love, and the whole world with all its
contents seemed totally, even absurdly, inadequate to satisfy this
great capacity. I suffered over it without understanding it.
IX
I had a garden full of old-fashioned flowers, surrounded by high
walls with thatch. As I grew in my heart more and more away from
the world, I worked more in the garden, and whilst I worked I
thought mostly about God--God so far away and hidden, and yet so
near my heart.
There were many different song-birds in the garden, and one robin. I
loved the robin best of all. His song was not so beautiful as the
blackbird's or so mellow as the thrush's; but they hid and ran away
from me, whilst the robin sought me out and stayed with me and
sang me, all to myself, a little, tiny, gentle song of which I never
grew tired. If I stayed quite still, he came so close he almost touched
me; but if I moved towards him, he flew away in a great fright.
It seemed to me I was like that robin, and I wanted to come close,
close to the feet of God. But He would not let me find Him. He
would not make me any sign. He would not let me feel I knew Him.
Did He in His wisdom know that if He showed Himself too openly I
should go mad with fear or joy? I could not tell. But every day as the
robin sang to me in the garden I sang to God a little gentle song out
of my heart--a song to the hidden God Who called me, and when I
answered Him would not be found, and, still remaining hidden,
called and called till I was dumb with the pain and wonder of this
mystery.
Then suddenly came the Great War. My husband was amongst the
first to have to go. All my love for him which I had thought to be
fading now rose up again to its full strength: it was no mere weakly
sentiment, but a powerful type of human love which had been able
to carry me through fifteen years of married life without one hour of
quarrelling; its roots were deep into my heart and mind: the very
strength and perfection of it but made of it a greater instrument for
torture. Why should this most beautiful of all human emotions carry
with it so heavy a penalty, for which no remedy appeared to exist? It
had not then been made clear to me that all human loves must first
be offered up and ascend into the love of God: then only are they
freed from this Pain-Tax. God must first be All in All to us before
we can enter amongst the number who are all in all to Him--constantly
consoled by Him. This condition of being all in all is demanded as
a right by all men and women in mutual love, yet we deny this right
to God: we are not even willing to attempt it! this failure to be
willing is the grave error we make. Our attitude to God is not one
of love, but of an expectancy of favours. An identical sacrifice
is demanded of us in marriage--father, mother, brothers, sisters,
friends: all these loves must become subservient to the new love,
and with what willingness and smiles this sacrifice is usually
made! Not so with our sacrifices to God--we make them with bitter
tears, hard hearts, long faces. Is He never hurt by this perpetual
grudgingness of love?
But I had not yet learnt any of this, and I could not accept, I could
not swallow this terrible cup. I thought of Christ in the Garden
of Gethsemane. He understood and knew all pain; I had His
companionship, but He offered me no cessation of this pain. It must
be borne; had He not borne His own up to the bitter end? I shrank,
appalled, from the suffering I was already in and the suffering that
lay before me. Relief from this agony, relief, relief! But there was no
relief. In utter darkness all must be gone through. At least I was not
so foolish as to attribute all this horror that was closing in upon the
world to the direct Will of God: I could perceive that, on the
contrary, it was the spirit of Anti-Christ, it was the will of Man with
his greeds, his cruelty, his self-sufficient pride, together with a host
of other evils, which had brought all this to pass. But could
not--would not--God deliver the innocent; must all alike descend into
the pit?
I tried to obtain relief by casting this burden on to Christ, and was
not able to accomplish it. I tried to draw the succour of God down
into my heart, and I tried to throw myself out and up to Him--I could
do neither: the vast barrier remained; Faith could not take me
through it.
A horrible kind of second sight now possessed me, so that, although
I never heard one word from my husband, I became aware of much
that was happening to him--knew him pressed perpetually
backwards, fighting for his life, knew him at times lying exhausted
out in the open fields at night. At last I began to fear for my reason; I
became afraid of the torture of the nights and sat up reading, forcing
my mind to concentrate itself upon the book--the near-to-hand help
of the book was more effective than the spiritual help in which
something altogether vital was still missing. Relief only came when
after a month a letter reached me from my husband, saying that the
terrible retreat was over and he safe.
Months and years dragged by. Sometimes the pain of it all was
eased; sometimes it increased.
As grass mown down and withered in the fields gives out the
pleasant scent of hay, so in her laceration and her anguish did the
soul, I wondered, give off some Pain-Song pleasing to Almighty
God.
At first I recoiled with terror from this thought; finally love
overcame the terror--I was willing to have it so, if it pleased Him.
My soul reached down into great and fearful depths. I envied the
soldiers dying upon the battlefields; life was become far more
terrible to me than death. Looking back upon my struggles, I see
with profound astonishment how unaware I was of my impudence to
God in attributing to Him qualities of cruelty and callousness, such
as are to be found only amongst the lowest men!
Yet good was permitted to come out of this evil; for where I
attributed to God a callousness and even an enjoyment of my
sufferings, I learnt self-sacrifice, the effacement of all personal gain,
and total submission for love's sake to His Will, cruel though I might
imagine it to be. With what tears does the heart afterwards address
itself in awed repentance to its Beloved and Gentle God!
A painful illness came and lasted for months. Having no home, I
was obliged to endure the misery of it as best I could among
strangers. At this time I touched perhaps the very lowest depths.
How often I longed that I might never wake in the morning! I
loathed my life.
During this illness I came exceedingly near to Christ, so much so
that I am not able to describe the vividness of it. What I learnt out of
this time of suffering I do not know--save complete submission. I
became like wax--wax which was asked to take only one impression,
and that pain. I was too dumb; I should have remembered those
words, that "men ought not to faint, but to pray."
Bewildered, and mystified by my own unhappiness and that of so
many others all around me, I sank in my submission too much into a
state of lethargic resignation, whereas an onward-driving resolution
to win through, a powerful determination to seek and obtain the
immediate protection and assistance of God, a standing before God,
and a claiming of His help--these things are required of the soul: in
fact that importunity is necessary of which Jesus spoke (Luke xi. 7-9):
"And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not . . . I
cannot rise and give thee. I say unto you he will not rise and give
him because he is his friend, yet _because of his importunity_ he
will rise and give him as many as he needeth. And I say unto you,
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it
shall be opened unto you."
Such times of distress are storms, fearful battles of the soul in which
she must not faint but rise up and walk towards God and clamour for
help; and she will receive it. In His own good time He will give her
all that she asks and more even than she dreamed of. She must claim
from God a continual restrengthening, and search with glowing
aspiration for a more joyous love.
X
It was summer-time: a great battle was raging in France. A friend
wrote me that my husband was up in the very foremost part of it. I
heard no word from my husband; weeks passed, and still the same
ominous silence. At last the day came when the shadow of these two
fearful years rose up and overwhelmed me altogether. I went up on
to the wild lonely hill where I so often walked, and there I
contended with God for His help. For the first time in my life there
was nothing between God and myself--this had _continually_
happened with Jesus Christ, but not with God the Father, Who
remained totally inaccessible to me. Now, like a man standing
in a very dark place and seeing nothing but knowing himself
immediately near to another--so I knew myself in very great
nearness to God. I had no need for eyes to see outwardly, because of
the immense magnetism of this inward Awareness. At one moment
my heart and mind ran like water before Him--praying Him,
beseeching Him for His help; at another my soul stood straight up
before Him, contending and claiming because she could bear no
more: and it felt as though the Spirit of God stood over against my
spirit, and my spirit wrestled with God's Spirit for more than an hour.
But He gave me no answer, no sign, no help. He gave me nothing
but that awful silence which seems to hang for ever between God
and Man. And I became exhausted, and turned away in despair from
God, and from supplication, and from striving, and from contending,
and, very quiet and profoundly sad, I stood looking out across the
hills to the distant view--how gentle and lovely this peace of the
evening sky, whilst on earth all the nations of the world were
fighting together in blood and fury and pain!
I had stood there for perhaps ten minutes, mutely and sadly
wondering at the meaning of it all, and was commencing to walk
away when suddenly I was surrounded by a great whiteness which
blotted out from me all my surroundings. It was like a great light or
white cloud which hid all my surroundings from me, though I stood
there with my eyes wide open: and the cloud pricked, so that I said
to myself, "It is an electric cloud," and it pricked me from my head
down to my elbows, but no further. I felt no fear whatever, but a
very great wonder, and stood there all quite simple and placid,
feeling very quiet. Then there began to be poured into me an
indescribably great vitality, so that I said to myself, "I am being
filled with some marvellous Elixir." And it filled me from the feet
up, gently and slowly, so that I could notice every advance of it. As
it rose higher in me, so I grew to feel freed: that is to say, I had
within me the astounding sensation of having the capacity to pass
where or how I would--which is to say I felt freed of the law of
gravity. I was like a free spirit--I felt and knew within myself this
glorious freedom! I tasted for some moments a new form of living!
Words are unable to convey the splendour of it, the boundless joy,
the liberty, the glory of it.
And the incomprehensible Power rose and rose in me until it
reached the very crown of my head, and immediately it had quite
filled me a marvellous thing happened--the Wall, the dreadful
Barrier between God and me, came down entirely, and immediately
I loved Him. I was so filled with love that I had to cry aloud my love,
so great was the force and the wonder and the delight and the might
of it.
And now, slowly, the vivid whiteness melted away so that I saw
everything around me once more just as before; but for a little while
I continued to stand there very still and thoughtful, because I was
filled with wonder and great peace.
Then I turned to walk home, but I walked as a New Creature in a
New World--my heart felt like the heart of an angel, glowing white-hot
with the love for God, and all my sorrows fled away in a vast joy!
This was His answer, this was His help. After years and years of
wrestling and struggling, in one moment of time He had let me find
Him, He had poured His Paradise into my soul! Never was such
inconceivable joy--never was such gladness! My griefs and pains
and woes were wiped away--totally effaced as though they had
never existed!
Oh, the magnificence of such splendid joy! The whole of space
could scarcely now be large enough to hold me! I needed all of it--I
welcomed its immensity as once I was oppressed by it. God and my
Soul, and Love, and Light, and Space!
PART II
At last my little suffering life is sheltered in the known, the felt,
protection of the Ineffable and Invisible Being. The Being
Who, without revealing Himself to me by sight or sound, yet
communicates Himself to me in some divine manner at once
all-sufficing and inexpressible. I ask no questions: I am in no haste of
anxious learning. My heart and my mind and my soul stand still and
drink in the glory of this happiness. All day, often half the night, I
worship Him. I love Him with this new love, so different from
anything known before. The greatest earthly love, by comparison to
it, has become feeble, impure, almost grotesque in its inefficiency--a
tinsel counterfeit of this glistening mystery which must still be
spoken of as love because I know no other name.
I find it difficult, almost impossible, to speak to my fellow-creatures,
because I have only two words, two thoughts in my entire being: my
God, and my love for Him.
I am like a thing that is magnetised, held: I am not able, day or night,
to detach my mind from God.
I wake with His name upon my lips, with His glory in my soul. In all
this there is no virtue on my part; there is no effort; the capacity for
this boundless devotion is a free gift. Coming immediately after my
anguished prayer on the hill, it appears to me to have come solely on
account of that one prayer--the previous prayers, struggles,
endeavours of five-and-twenty years are entirely forgotten. I
comprehend nothing of the mystery, neither as yet do I feel any
desire to comprehend it; but in a world where only love, beauty,
happiness, and repose exist, I walk and talk and live alone with God.
Yet the war was continuing as usual, my husband was in the same
danger, I became ill with influenza, my friends continued to die of
wounds, my relations to be killed one by one; but in all this there
was no pain: the sting, the anguish, had gone out of every single
thing in life.
My consciousness feels to be composed of two extremes: I am a
child of a few years of age, to whom sin, suffering, pain, evil, and
temptation are not known, and yet, though knowing so little, I know
the unutterably great--I know God. This cannot be expressed--merely,
it can be said that two extremes have met.
This new consciousness, this new worship, this new love is for the
Godhead. Christ is gone up into the Godhead, and I worship Him in,
and as One with, the Godhead. For three months this continues
uninterruptedly. Then Jesus Christ presents Himself to my
consciousness. Jesus, Who led me to this happiness, now calls and
calls to my soul. Immediately I commence to respond to Him. He is
drawing me away; He is teaching me something--at first I do not
know what, but soon I know that He is leading me out of this Eden,
this paradise of my childhood: I know it, because I begin to feel pain
again, and to recognise evil. O my Jesus, my Jesus, must I really
follow Thee out of Paradise back into pain? Yes, in less than two
weeks I am fully back in the world again--but not the same world,
_because I know how to escape from it._ The Door that I knocked at,
and that all in one moment was opened to me, is _never closed._ I
can go in and out. God never closes to me the right of way; never
severs those secret wires of Divine Communication.
But my soul is not nursed, as it were, in His Hands day and night--she
must learn to grow up. Woeful education, deadly days of learning,
stony paths that hurt, that hurt all the more because of the felicity
that only so recently was mine.
For three months I am walking further and further out of Eden and
back into the horrors of the world--following Jesus.
One night I compose myself as usual for sleep, but I do not sleep,
neither can I say that I am quite awake. It is neither sleep, nor is my
wakefulness the usual wakefulness. I do not dream, I cannot move.
My consciousness is alight with a new fiery energy of life; it feels to
extend to an infinite distance beyond my body, and yet remains
connected with my body. I live in a manner totally new and totally
incomprehensible, a life in which none of my senses are used and
which is yet a thousand, and more than a thousand, times as vivid. It
is living at white heat--without forms, without sound, without sight,
without anything which I have ever been aware of in this world, and
at a terrible speed. What is the meaning of all this? I do not know:
my body is quite helpless and is distressed, but I am not afraid. God
is teaching me something in His own way. For six weeks every night
I enter this condition, and the duration and power or intensity of it
increase by degrees. It feels that my soul is projected or travels for
incalculable distances beyond my body--(long afterwards I
understand through experience that this is not the mode of it, but that
the soul _remaining in the body_ is by some de-insulation exposed
to the knowledge of spirit-life as and when free of the flesh)--and I
learn to comprehend and to know a new manner of living, as a
swimmer learns a new mode of progression by means of his
swimming, which is not his natural way.
By the end of three weeks I can remain nightly for many hours in
this condition, which is always accompanied by an intense and vivid
consciousness of God.
As this consciousness of God becomes more and more vivid so my
body suffers more and more. By day I can only eat the smallest
morsels of food, which almost choke me, but I drink a great quantity
of water. I am perfectly healthy, though I have hardly any sleep and
very little, indeed almost no, food--the suffering is only at night with
the breathing and the heart when in this strange condition. But I
have no anxiety whatever; I am glad that He shall do as He pleases
with me. Nothing but love can give us this supreme confidence.
During the whole of these experiences I live in a state of very
considerable abstraction. But this now suddenly increases, increases
to such an extent that I hardly know whether to call it abstraction or
the extremity of poverty. I now become divested of all interests
outside and inside, divested of the greater part of my intelligence,
divested of my will. I am of no value whatever, less than the dust on
the road.
In this awful nothingness I am still I. My consciousness continues
and is not confounded with or lost in any other consciousness, but is
reduced to stark nakedness and worth nothing: and this worthless
nothing is hung up and, as it were, suspended nowhere in particular
as far from earth as from heaven, totally unknown and unwanted by
both God and Man. I am naked patience--waiting. I have a few
thoughts, but very few: I think one thought where in normal times I
should think ten thousand. I feel and know that I am nothing, and I
feel that this has been done to me; just as before, all that I had was
also done to me and was a gift. So I acknowledge that I once had
and was perhaps something and that now I possess and certainly am
nothing--I acknowledge it, I accept it, without hesitation, without
protest. One of my few thoughts is that I shall remain for the rest of
my natural life in this pitiful state where, however, I shall hope to be
preserved from further sinning simply because I have not a
sufficiency of will, intelligence, or thought with which to sin! I am
too completely nothing to be able to sin. I have another thought,
which is that as I no longer have any intelligence with which to deal
with the ordinary difficulties of life, such as street life and traffic, I
shall shortly be run over and killed; and so I put a card with my
address on it into my little handbag, for the convenience of those
who shall be obliged to deal with my body afterwards.
I have just sufficient capacity left me to automatically, mechanically,
go through with the necessities of life. I have not become idiotic. I
live in a tremendous and profound solitude, such a solitude as would
frighten many people greatly. But my beautiful pastime had
accustomed me to solitude and also to something of this
nothingness--a brief nothingness was a necessary part of the
beautiful pastime: so I have no fears now of any kind; but I wonder.
Perhaps I am just four things--wonder, patience, resignation, and
nothing.
Yet through this dreadful solitude penetrates the inspiration of some
unseen guide. As regards this particular time I am convinced that
this guide is an outside presence. I depend in all my goings and
comings upon the guidance of this guide who proves incredibly
accurate in every detail, in details of even the smallest necessities. If
this guide is a part of myself, it is that of me with which I have not
previously come in contact; and it is not the Reason, but far beyond
the Reason, for it _divines._ It is then either a spiritual guide,
companion, or guardian angel, or it is a power possessed by the soul
herself--a foretasting cognisance, a mysterious intuition of which we
as yet comprehend little or nothing, and which we have not yet
learnt to command: it presents itself; it absents itself; but it
condescends to every need; it is always helpful, always beneficent; it
sees that which it sees before the event; it hears that which it hears
before the words are spoken. It guides by what would seem to be
two very different modes: the greater things come by a mode
altogether indescribable; but for the small things of every day I will
take simple examples here and there. I am abroad. Someone in the
family at home is taken dangerously ill. I am urgently needed; but
the trains are overcrowded, I am unable to get my seat transferred to
an earlier date, I cannot let them know at home when I shall return:
all is uncertain, all is chaos. I am painfully anxious, I am ashamed to
say I am greatly worried: I turn as always to my Lord, asking Him to
forgive these selfish fears and to help me. A little while later a scene
presents itself to me--I see my own room, I hear the voice of a page-boy
standing in the door and saying, "You are wanted on the
telephone"; then I am at the telephone, and a voice is saying to me,
"_Your train accommodation is transferred to Friday the 19th._"
That is all, because I am rung off.
Five days pass. I am in my room, and the page is really standing at
the door, and he says, "You are wanted on the telephone." I go to the
telephone, and a voice says, "_Your train accommodation is
transferred to Friday the 19th._" That is all, because I am rung off.
Again, there is a young lay-reader, closely in contact with Christ; he
has a wife and young child. The weather is bitterly cold. A picture
suddenly comes before me of this family, and there is a voice saying,
"_He was gathering together the last little pieces of fuel when your
present came._" Immediately I understand that I am required to send
coal to these people, and to do it at once without delay. The
following day the wife comes with tears to thank me, and she tells
me, "We were in despair; my husband's heart is so weak he cannot
bear the cold, he becomes seriously ill. _He was gathering together
the last little pieces of fuel when your present came._"
Or, again, I very badly need a pair of walking shoes, but for weeks I
have been so absorbed in contemplation that the pain of bringing
myself from this holy joy to do shopping is too great, and I delay
and delay; I cannot bring myself to it; but shoes are a necessity of
earthly life. Having exceedingly narrow feet, I am obliged always to
get my shoes from a certain maker, and now, during the war, he
makes so few shoes. To-day a picture of the shop comes before me,
and the words "Go to-day, go to-day," urge themselves upon my
consciousness. Then a picture comes of the assistant; I show her my
foot, and she says, "_There is only one pair left; how fortunate you
came to-day!_" So I understand I must go to my shopping and,
greatly against my will, I go that afternoon. The assistant comes
forward, and I show her my foot, and she says, "_There is only one
pair left; how fortunate you came to-day!_"
Always in this mode of the guiding are the little picture and the
_exact_ words: all of it of the easiest to describe; but of the other
and the greater guiding I do not know how to tell. It is sheer pure
knowledge, received not in parts, pictures, or words, but as a whole
and in a mode so exquisitely mysterious as to be at once too intricate
for description, and yet simplicity itself!
Sure, perfect, and serene mode of knowledge! Royal knowledge
which knows no toil, no sweat of work, no common drudgery, art
thou of the soul herself, or art thou altogether from outside the soul?
This I know, that though the first mode would seem to be very small
and to deal with littleness, and the last mode seems to be entirely
apart from it because of the greatnesses with which it deals that they
are linked and that the power is one power soaring to the highest,
condescending to the smallest.
So now, in the time of this strange abstraction and poverty, when the
cinematograph of my mind is closed down, and with it the delicate
mechanism which takes up, uses, and connects all that we take
in by the senses, and which makes the world so real and so
comprehensible, is become unhitched and disconnected, so that
nothing in the world seems any longer real or possesses either value
or meaning, and I stand before it all defenceless, seemingly unable
to deal with it, utterly indifferent to it; then and now Reason may
very well say to me, "You are in very great danger"; but I am not in
any danger, because I am guided whenever necessary by some
condescending sagacity far more sagacious than my poor Reason,
infinitely more penetrative and effectual than any sense of eye or ear.
I remain fully convinced that at this time, at any rate, it was an
outside sagacity which guided me--truly a guardian angel.
This period of intense abstraction, this strange valley of humiliation,
poverty, solitude, seemed a necessary prelude to the great, the
supreme, experience of my life. As I came slowly out of this poverty
and solitude, the joyousness of my spiritual experience increased:
the nights were no longer at all a time of sleep or repose, but of
rapturous living.
The sixth week came, and I commenced to fear the nights and this
tremendous living, because the happiness and the light and the
poignancy and the rapture of it were becoming more than I could
bear. I began to wonder secretly if God intended to draw my soul so
near to Him that I should die of the splendour of this living, My
raptures were not only caused by the sense of the immediate
Presence of God--this is a distinctive rapture running through and
above all raptures, but there are lesser ecstasies caused by the
meeting of the soul with Thoughts or Ideas, with melodies which
bear the soul in almost unendurable delight upon a thousand
summits of perfection; and with an all-pervading rapturous Beauty
in a great light. There is this peculiarity about the manner of these
thoughts and melodies and beauties--they are not spoken, heard, or
seen, but _lived._ I could not pass these things to my reason and
translate the Ideas into words or the melodies into sounds, or the
beauty into objects, for spirit-living is not translatable to earth-living,
and I found in it no words, no sounds, no objects, and I
comprehended and I lived with that in me which is above Reason
and of which I had, previously to these experiences, had no
cognisance.
There came a night when I passed beyond Ideas, beyond melody,
beyond beauty, into vast lost spaces, depths of untellable bliss, into a
Light. And the Light is an ecstasy of delight, and the Light is an
ocean of bliss, and the Light is Life and Love, and the Light is the
too deep contact with God, and the Light is unbearable Joy; and in
unendurable bliss my soul beseeches God that He will cover her
from this most terrible rapture, this felicity which exceeds all
measure. And she is not covered from it. And she beseeches Him
again; and she is not covered; and being in the last extremity from
this most terrible joy, she beseeches Him again: and immediately is
covered from it.
* * *
My soul, my whole being, is terrified of God, and of joy. I dare not
think of Him, I dare not pray; but, like some pitiful and wounded
child, I creep to the feet of Jesus.
When on the following evening once more the day closes and I
compose myself for the night, I wonder tremblingly to what He will
again expose me; but for the first time in six weeks I fall into a
natural sleep and know no more until the morning.
Then I understand that the lesson is over. Mighty and Terrible God,
it was enough!
In the light of these measureless joys what is any earthly joy? What
is the very greatest experience of earthly happiness but so much
waste paper?
What are the joys of those vices for which men sell their souls, but
soap-bubbles!
The whole meaning of life, together with all the graduated and
accepted values of it, becomes for ever changed in the light of the
knowledge of Celestial Happiness.
PART III
I
Wonderful, beautiful weeks went by, filled with divine,
indescribable peace. The Presence of God was with me day and
night, and the world was not the world as I had once known it--a
place where men and women fought and sinned and toiled and
anguished and wondered horribly the meaning of this mystery of
pain and joy, of life and death. The world was become Paradise, and
in my heart I cried to all my fellow-souls, "Why fret and toil, why
sweat and anguish for the things of earth when our own God has in
His hand such peace and bliss and happiness to give to Every man?
O come and receive it, Every man his share."
And the glamour of life in Unity with God became past all
comprehension and all words.
Is life, then, a poem? is it a melody? I cannot say; but it is one long
essence of delight--a harmony of flowing out and back again to God.
O blessed life! O blessed Man! O blessed God!
II
One morning in my room I began thinking and reasoning about a
wonderful change that I knew had crept all through me. If God
should now come at any moment of the day or night and turn over
every secret page of heart and mind, He would not find one thought
or glimmer of any sort or kind of lust, whether of the eye, of the
heart, of the mind, or of the body; and all in one moment I realised
the miracle that Christ had worked in me, and the words came over
my mind, "Though thy sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as
snow." And I stood there, gazing before me, speechless, and the
tears of a joy that was an agony of gratitude poured and poured
down my face like a rain. I did not sob, I could not speak, and very
quietly I took my heart and my mind and my soul and laid them for
ever at the feet of Christ.
III
One evening as I knelt to say my prayers, which were never long,
because since the Visitation on the hill my natural habit--whether
walking, sitting, working, travelling, or on my bed--had come to be
a continual sending up from my heart and mind the tenderest and
most adoring, the most worshipping and thanking little stream of
thoughts to God (very much as a flower, if we could but see it, sends
its scent to the sun).
And because this mode of prayer is so smooth and joyous, so easy,
so unutterably sweet, in that during it the Presence of God laves us
about as the sun laves the flower--so because of this it was only for
short and set times that I worshipped Him as the creature in prayers
upon its knees; but those few moments of prayer would always be
intense, the heart and the mind with great power bent wholly and
singly upon God.
So now, this evening as I knelt and dwelt in great singleness on God,
He drew me so powerfully, He encompassed me so with His
glamour, that this singleness and concentration of thought continued
much longer than usual on account of the greatness of the love that I
felt for Him, and the concentration became an intensity of
penetration because of this magnetism, He turned on to me, and my
mind became faint, and died, and I could no longer think of or on
God, _for I was one with Him._ And I was still I; though I was
become Ineffable Joy.
When it was over I rose from my knees, and I said to myself, for
five wonderful moments I have been in contact with God in an
unutterable bliss and repose: and He gave me the bliss tenderly and
not as on that Night of Terror; but when I looked at my watch I saw
that it had been for between two and three hours.
Then I wondered that I was not stiff, that I was not cold, for the
night was chilly and I had nothing about me but a little velvet
dressing-wrapper; and my neck was not stiff, though my head had
been thrown back, as is a necessity in Communion with God; and I
thought to myself, it is as if my body also had shared in the blessing.
And this most blessed happening happened to me every day for a
short while, usually only for a few moments. In this way God
Himself caused and enabled me to contemplate and _know_ Him;
and I saw that it was in some ways at one with my beautiful pastime,
but with this tremendous difference in it--that whereas my mind had
formerly concentrated itself upon the Beautiful, and remaining Mind
had soared away above all forms into its nebulous essence in a
strange seductive anguish, it now was drawn and magnetised beyond
the Beautiful directly to the Maker of it: and the soaring was like a
death or swooning of the mind, and immediately I was living with
that which is above the mind: in this living there was no note of pain,
but a marvellous joy.
Slowly I learnt to differentiate degrees of Contemplation, but to my
own finding there are two principal forms--Passive and Active (or
High) Contemplation.
In meditation is little or no activity, but a sweet quiet thinking and
talking with Jesus Christ. In Passive Contemplation is the beginning
of real activity; mind and soul without effort (though in a secret state
of great love-activity) raise themselves, focussing themselves upon
the all-unseen Godhead: now is no longer any possible picture in the
mind, of anyone nor anything, not even of the gracious figure or of
the ways of Christ: here, because of love, must begin the sheer
straight drive of will and heart, mind and soul, to the Godhead, and
here we may be said first to commence to breathe the air of heaven.
There is no prayer, no beseeching, and no asking--there are no
words and no thoughts save those that intrude and flash unwanted
over the mind, but a great undivided attention and waiting upon God:
God near, yet never touching. This state is no ecstasy, but smooth,
silent, high living in which we learn heavenly manners. This is
Passive or Quiet Contemplation.
High Contemplation ends in Contact with God, in ecstasy and
rapture. In it the activity of the soul (though entirely without effort
on her part) is immensely increased. It is not to be sought for, and
we cannot reach it for ourselves; but it is to be enjoyed when God
calls, when He assists the soul, when He energises her.
And then our cry is no more, Oh, that I had wings! but, Oh, that I
might fold my wings and stay!
IV
Having come so far as this on the Soul's Great Adventure all alone
as far as human guidance and companionship was concerned, and
having for more than a year known the wonders of the joy of Union
with God--which I did not know or understand to call Union, but
called it to myself Finding God and coming into Contact with Him,
because this is how it _feels,_ and the unscholarly creature
understands and knows it in that way--well, having come so far, I
had a great longing to share this knowledge, this exquisite balm,
with my fellows, and I desired immensely to speak about it, to know
how they fell about it, if they had yet come to it, or how far on the
way they were to it, because I was all filled with the beauty of it, as
lovers are filled with the beauty of their love. But I was frightened to
speak to them, something held me back: also they felt to me to be so
exceedingly full of the merest trifles--clothes and tea-parties and
fashionable friends; and each time I tried to speak, in some
mysterious way I found myself stopped. So I thought that I would
speak to a friend that I had in the Church. Several times I had heard
him preach very beautiful sermons, and I felt I very greatly needed
the guidance of _someone who knew._ I wanted, I longed for, a
human intermediary. I knew that I was in the hands of the God
Whom for so many years I had so passionately sought; but He was
so immeasurably great, and I so pitifully small, and I needed a
human being--someone to whom I might speak about God.
Yet something warned me not to commence as though speaking of
myself, but of another person. I said only a few words, of the joy of
this person in finding and loving God, and immediately my friend
spoke very severely of persons who imagined they had found, and
loved, God. God was not to be found by our puny, shifting and
uncertain love: He was to be found by duty, by obedience to Church
rules, by pious attendance _At Church._ He explained to me various
dogmas which helped me no more than the moaning of the wind; he
explained the absolute necessity (for salvation) of certain beliefs and
written sentences, and ceremonials in the Church. Love was not the
way. Love was emotion, emotion was deceptive: the mind, and
severe firm attention to the dictates of The Church was what was
required; in fact, he unfolded before me the Ecclesiastical Mind. I
shrank back from it, dismayed, frightened. Were all the deep needs
and requirements of the soul to be satisfied in the singing of hymns
and Te Deum, in the close and reverent attention to the Ceremonies
before the altar, and of the actions of Priests! Did, or could, any
reasoning creature truly think to Find God by merely repeating,
however reverently, the same prayers and ceremonies Sunday after
Sunday! Could the great mountain up which my soul had sweated,
and which each soul must climb--could it be climbed by kneeling in
a pew in church? No; a total change of _character_ was needed, and
Christ Himself was necessary for this change--Jesus Christ gliding
into the heart and mind and soul, and _biding_ there because of that
heart's, that mind's, invitation to, and love for, Him. Secretly--in
one's own chamber, every hour of the day, in the streets, in the
fields--in this way it might be accomplished.
With Christ biding in the heart all the Church service would
_become_ a thing of beauty as between the Soul and God; but
without this Jesus Christ dwelling in the heart, the connection was
not yet made between the Soul--the service--and the Godhead.
Perhaps amongst Romans I should find the understanding that I
looked for. I had a friend, a Dominican: I approached him, and I
could see that for (as he thought) my own good he longed to convert
me to the Roman Church: it did not seem that he wanted, or by any
means knew how, to bring me into contact with God, but his thought
was to bring me to _The Church._ "Does anyone," I asked him,
"love God with all their heart, and mind, and soul, and strength?"
"No," said he, "that is hardly possible--what is required is--"; and
here he gave me once more the contents of the Ecclesiastical Mind:
more authoritatively, more positively; but he spoke as I now
commenced to realise all Churchmen would speak--that is to say, as
persons having learnt by study, by careful rule and rote, by
paper-knowledge, that which can only be learnt in the spirit direct from
God. How immense is the difference to the Soul between this
knowledge that comes of the spirit and the knowledge that comes of
study--the knowledge which too easily becomes mechanical religion!
I thought of the beautiful and gracious simplicity of the knowledge
that Christ gives to the soul: I saw the nature of the sore disease that
afflicts the soul of Christ's Church, I saw also a terrible pain for
Christ in all this of which I had previously been unaware.
I was thrown back and into myself by it all, and into a great
loneliness as far as my fellow-beings were concerned. Yet I
continued to need to share Christ with humanity, piercingly,
pressingly. I would go to a library and find a book--but, on the other
hand, I did not know the name of a single religious book or writer.
So I wrote my need to a friend, and she sent me the life of one,
Angela of Foligno. This book was a great delight to me, because,
though written in tiresome mediaeval language, it yet expressed and
shared exactly what I also knew and loved, and folded in strange
wrappings of the fashion of the thought of long ago lay the same
exquisite jewel that I also knew--the pearl for which men gladly sell
all that they have in order to keep it--the knowledge of the Secret of
the Kingdom of Heaven, of the Union of the Soul with God.
A few months went by, and I wrote asking for another book, and this
time came Richard Rolle to my acquaintance--a little dried-up
hermit, a holy man too, though I noticed how very discourteous he
was to women; severe, critical, and suspicious, merely because they
were women. How often I noticed this peculiarity, both in the monks
of to-day with their averted eyes, as if the shadow of a woman
falling on them were pollution, and long ago, Paul, and Peter also,
and Moses, and many others, showed surprising weakness of
intolerance and harsh judgment against Woman!
Where was Wisdom in all this? Surely it was Folly flaunting and
laughing and dressing herself cunningly to deceive, for did none of
these men, from Adam downwards--did they never come to know
themselves well enough to see that their danger lay not in the
Woman, but in _their own inclination to sin!_
Oh, the righteousness of the greatest saint was, and is, but as dust
and ashes before the righteousness of Jesus! and I came to wonder if
there ever was or could be a saint, save one--Jesus.
But this Richard Rolle, this person so discourteous to some
fellow-beings, could all the same be very tender and loving towards God:
he, too, held in his heart the Pearl without Price. He, too, knew that
marvellous incense of the heart to God--that song of the soul, and
called it by the same name as I; but how could it be called by any
other name? for every soul that knows it, it must ever be the same.
Oh, how intimately I knew those two people of centuries ago, and
how intimately they knew me! A strange trio we made--he, the little
wizened English hermit; she, the Italian woman in her nun's habit;
and I in my modern Bond Street clothes: outwardly we were indeed
incongruous, we had no links, but inwardly we were bound together
by bonds of the purest gold.
Of whether my friend sent me another book or not I cannot be sure;
but my interest was becoming altogether removed from the past,
because Christ was pressing me more and more to the present and
the living.
V
God says to the aspiring soul: Come, taste of paradise and taste of
heaven, and then return thou to the earth and wait, but not in
idleness, and suffer many things till thou become perfect.
So I found that in the earlier stages, in order to show me the heights
to which I might by perseverance attain, He turned His Power and
Glamour on to me, and I became a creature transfixed and held by
love. I had one desire--God; I had one thought--God; I had one
consciousness--God. There was no effort needed on my part: it was
Pure Grace and the result of _past_ efforts. Having climbed and
endured and endeavoured up to a certain degree, it was necessary for
further advance that there should be more knowledge, and a more
complete ineffaceable assurance. He therefore exposed the soul to as
much as she could enjoy of heavenly pleasures and consciousness,
without death to the flesh. In these experiences the soul found and
knew God to be the fulfilment of all desires and all needs. The soul
stood steadied before God in an unutterable Happiness which she
perceived had no limit but God's Will, and her own capacity to
endure the rapture of Him.
What is it that would seem to determine this immeasurable privilege
of Access to Him? It would seem to be a healthy willing will
towards Him under all circumstances (to begin with).
In due time He converts this mere will into a sweet love, the natural
love of the heart and mind--by Gift of the Father we love Jesus
Christ. This is salvation.
But beyond salvation it would feel to be this way--after a further
great endeavour and endurance on our part, a further great striving
towards Him, He will awaken and prick to new life the soul and fill
us with Holy Love. This is the second baptism, the baptism of the
Spirit of Love. This is the entry to the Kingdom, and immediately
we taste of the Godhead. What this is, what this ravishment of
happiness is, cannot be known or guessed till we ourself have
experienced it.
In all this we progress by the communicated Power of Christ. How
is this Power to be recognised, how is it communicated? Can we
stand still and receive it like the dew, without work? At first, no--but
later it would almost seem to be yes; or else it is that the exact
attitude of heart and mind necessary for the reception of Grace
becomes so habitual, so natural, that eventually we come to live in a
state in which the communication of this Power becomes nearly
continuous--though at any time by negligence or by a wrong attitude
of Spirit _we fall away from it and lose it completely,_ and in all
times of temptation or of testing we are cut off from _sensible_
contact with it.
We learn then that Grace awaits every creature that attunes himself
to the Will of Christ: it awaits good and bad, saint and sinner, it
transforms the sinner into the saint, and but for its deliberate
withdrawals we might suppose its action to be automatic, we might
suppose it a fixed power like the sun, shining upon worthy and
unworthy alike in degree. But Grace is far more subtle and
mysterious than this. Grace is the most sublime, the most exquisite
secret of all the mysteries which exist between the Soul and her
Maker.
* * *
I find that He works upon my soul by two opposite ways: He draws
her up to contact and sublime content; He sets her down to solitude
and hides Himself: He is there, and will not speak.
And she suffers horribly: and why not? Where is the injustice of this
pain?
Countless ages ago--who can count them?--the soul, born in a palace,
has deliberately willed and chosen to become the Wanderer, the
Street Walker; therefore fold up self-pity and lay it aside, because it
does not live in the same house with Truth.
Cast off self-consciousness and pride, because they are ridiculous,
and a man can only be great or noble in just so far as he has
abandoned them.
* * *
What is it that often makes it so much harder for the soul to refind
God when she is enclosed in the male body? Perhaps the greater
strength of the natural lusts of the male: perhaps the pride of
"Being"--as lord of creation; or the pride of Intelligence which says,
I rely easily upon myself, I need no religion of hymn tunes, I leave
hymn tunes to women, for the ardour and capacity of my manhood
rush to far different aims.
But can any sane man think that the Essential Being who has created
the universe, with all its infinite wonders, and this earth with its
beauty and its wonderful flesh, and so much more that is not flesh
but the still more wonderful spirit--can any sane man really think
that this Essential Being is stuck fast at hymn tunes (which are
Man's own invention!) and knows not how to satisfy the needs and
longings of that which He has Himself created!
Ardent and greatly mistaken Sinner, know and remember that to
Find God is to Live Tremendously.
* * *
O belovèd Man with thy strangely vain and small pursuits and
pleasures--thy pipe, thy wine, thy women, thy "busy" city life, thine
immense sagacity which once in twenty times outwits a fool or
knave--thy vaunted living is a bubble in a hand-basin!
Find God and Live!
PART IV
I
It would seem that lazily, reposefully, comfortably, easily, we can
make no entry into the kingdom of heaven, but must enter by contest,
by great endeavour. The occasions of these contests will be
according to the everyday circumstances of each individual; the
stress or distress of everyday life; for this is Christ's Process--to take
the everyday woes and happenings of life in the flesh and use them
for spiritual ends. What does the Saviour Himself tell us of the
means of entry into the Kingdom? He uses two parables--that of the
loaves of bread, and that of the Widow, and both speak of persistent
importunity. If we would find God, we must besiege Him.
Of entry to Christ's Process first it is necessary that we try in
everything to please Him: subjecting our plans, desires, thoughts,
intentions, to His secret approval, asking ourselves, Will this please
Him best, or that?
Then the soul commences to truly know, and to respond to, Christ.
But she is not satisfied: she requires more. Woes may assail the
whole creature: Christ offers no alleviation. He leads her straight
into the woes: will she follow, will she hold back? The point to
remember here is this, that whether we follow Christ or no we shall
have woes: if we forsake Him, we are not rid of woes; if we follow
Him, we are not rid of woes--not yet, but later we become eased,
and even rid, by means of Consolations, for God is able by His
Consolations to entirely overbalance the woe and make it happy
peace, though the cause of the woe remains. Remember this in the
days of visitation, and follow Christ, no matter where He leads.
Christ leads _through_ the woe, because it is the shortest way. The
unguided soul wanders _beside_ the woe, hating and fearing it,
unable to rid herself of it, gaining nothing by it, suffering in vain,
and no Companion comes to ease the burden with His company.
The progress of our spiritual advance would feel to be that because
we become more and more aware of the failure of earthly
consolations and amusements, and more and more aware of the
suffering, the sin, and the evil that there is about us, so more and
more our desires go out towards the good, and more and more we
turn to Christ. Then Christ may deliberately make Himself
non-sufficient for the soul, and if He so does she must reach out after the
Godhead; then by means of more woes the soul and the creature
clamour more and more after the Godhead and will not be satisfied
with less than the Godhead, and, continuing to clamour, are brought
by Christ to the new birth, the Baptism of the Holy Ghost.
Immediately the soul and creature become rid of Woe; and, living a
life altogether apart from the world, in a marvellous crystal joy they
taste of the Godhead and of Eternal Pleasures.
This for a short time only: we have entered the Kingdom, but are
still the smallest of spiritual children: tenderly, wonderfully God
cares for us, but we must grow, we must learn heavenly manners. So
Jesus Christ calls us again, and where does He lead us? Straight
back into the world, the daily life from which we thought we had
escaped! Here truly is a Woe, a Woe worse than any Woe we ever
had before. Now we enter the Course of spiritual temptations, woes,
and endurances, and in the midst of the pots and pans of daily life
Christ teaches us heavenly manners.
II
Since Contemplation is so necessary for Union with God and for the
soul's _enjoyment_ of God--is it a capacity common to all persons?
Yes, though, like all other capacities, in varying degrees; but few
will give themselves up to the difficulties of developing the capacity;
and it is easy to know why, for our "natural" state is that we work
for that which brings the easiest, most immediate, and most
substantially visible reward.
Those who could most easily develop their powers of contemplation
are those to whom Beauty speaks, or those who are delicately
sensitive to some ideal, nameless, elusive, that draws and then
retreats, but in retreating still draws. The poet, the artist, the dreamer
_that harnesses his mind_--all can contemplate.
The Thinker, _thinking straight through,_ the proficient business
man with his powers of concentration, the first-rate organiser, the
scientist, the inventor--all these men are contemplatives who do not
drive to God, but to the world or to ambition. Taking God as their
goal, they could ascend to great heights of happiness; though first
they must give up ("sacrifice") all that is unsavoury in thought and
in living: yet such is the vast, the boundless Attraction of God that
having once (if only for a few moments) retouched this lost
Attraction of His, we afterwards are possessed with no other desire
so powerful as the desire to retouch Him again, and "sacrifice"
becomes no sacrifice.
Truly, having once known God, we find life without Him to be
meaningless and as unbeautiful as a broken stem without its flower:
pitiful, naked, and helpless as the body of a butterfly without the
wings.
III
At this time I read Bergson's _Creative Evolution_--a masterpiece of
thinking by a man who, like most others, is seeking for God. But I
am unable to read the book through because of the pain it causes.
The pain is partly the same pain which I knew (and which I re-enter
again in sympathy with the writer) when I tried in my youth to climb
to God by the intelligence and will of my mind; but there is also a
new pain, wide as an ocean, the pain of Compassion--for it is so
long this way to God that Bergson pursues, so long, so long; and the
particular way of this book is to me not like climbing, but
descending: it resembles the frenzied action of a man searching for
lilies downwards, digging with painful persistence in the dark earth
amongst roots. How much more joyous to find the lily where she
blooms, above in the light! There is another way of the Intelligence:
a way of climbing to icy heights, bare, unwarmed by any ray of love,
but less painful than this descent amongst dark roots. Cold, hard
Intelligence, once to slip upon thy frozen way is to be broken on thy
pitiless bosom! O God, in thy tender pity incline our hearts to seek
Thee by the way of Love! For the road of Love comes easily to
knowledge, but the road of knowledge comes not easily to Love.
And we know that love is above learning and wisdom. Did not
Solomon choose wisdom? and we think him so wise to have made
this choice, but he had been far wiser to have chosen holy love. For
wisdom lost herself and him in the arms of unworthy love: so we see
the highest degree of the Wisdom of Man held in bondage to, and
undone by, even the lowest degree of love.
* * *
Dig deeply, and what do we find is at bottom our great, our
persistent need? What is it that instinctively we look for and desire?
Happiness, and the Ever-new.
In and out of every day persistently, desperately, endlessly we seek.
And because we seek amongst the near-to-hand, the visible, the
small, we seek in vain: we discover there is nothing in this world
which can wholly and permanently satisfy either of these desires.
God Himself is Happiness. God Himself is the Ever-new.
In Divine Love there is no monotony: the soul finds that each
encounter with God is ever new, the Ever-new tremulous with the
beauty of rapture: new and wonderful as the first dawn.
IV
Not only is God a Mystery of Holiness, of Truth, of Love and
Beauty: He is also Generosity, a mystery of Eternal Giving, and His
giving is and must for ever be, the supreme necessity of the
Universe: for without He gave how should we receive life, truth,
beauty, love, or Himself?
And it cannot be too deeply impressed upon the soul that would
come to His Presence that because of His law of like to like she
must conform to this law in order to come to His Presence. By
thinking it over we shall see that it is more difficult for us to be
perfect holiness, perfect truth, perfect love, perfect beauty, than it is
for us to be perfectly generous: it is easier for us to give God all that
we have, to empty heart, mind and soul, and worldly goods at His
feet, than it is to reach to any other perfection; for generosity
appears to be more universal, more within our capacities, more
"natural" to us than any other virtue--do we not see it continually
used, exercised, spent, thrown away on the merest trifles? Let us
take, for instance, the tennis player: to win the game he must give
every ounce of himself to it--mind, eye, heart, and body,--sweating
there in the glare of the sun to win the game. Would he give himself
so, would he sweat so, in order to find God, or to please God? Oh no!
Yet in the hour of death and afterwards, will he be helped by this
victory of flying balls? If by chance we could lift a corner of the veil,
we might catch a glimpse of the face of Folly, mockingly, cunningly
peering at us, as all too easily she persuades us to give of our royal
coins of generosity to wantons, to phantom enterprises, to balls
filled with air, to dust and vanity.
Generosity is our easiest means of coming to God, because it is also
the way of love: if the tennis player did not love the game, he would
not give himself so to it. But we cry, "I have nothing whatever to
give to God; it is to God I turn in order that He may give everything
to me." Quite so: there is too much of that. We have obedience to
give: obedience is a great gift to God, or, more truthfully speaking,
in His magnanimity He accepts it as such; we have also love to give,
and again we may cry, "But my love is puny, shifting; it is nothing
at all, a mere trifle." That is true of "natural" love, of the love that
we commence of our own human nature to love Him with; but it is
not true of the love which we receive of the Holy Ghost when He
baptizes us.
When we offer this Peculiar Love, offer it as only it can be offered--for
love's sake,--immediately we are in the Presence of God, secretly,
marvellously united to Him; we are in the Consolations of God, and
we have no need to ask for anything whatever; indeed, we find
ourselves unable to ask, because we are filled to the brim,
overflowing, inexpressibly satisfied, utterly blessed.
But supposing that we do not _give_ to God, but, earnestly seeking
Him, we merely ask some favour, and sit and wait for Him to give?
Then probably we shall not be sensible of receiving anything from
Him whatever; we shall feel at an immense distance from Him; then
we shall become uneasy, depressed, fancy ourselves neglected,
imagine we have lost Him--and so we have till we gloriously
recover Him by means of giving.
And if at times in the stress of this giving, when He makes no
response, we feel it is too much, we can give no more, we are too
discouraged to continue, let us remember the strain and stress and
endeavour that we and all our friends give to trifles, and quietly use
our common sense to judge whether in the winning of a game of ball,
or in the pleasing and finding of God, we shall be the more blessed.
For God is to be found: He waits.
* * *
The truth about our endeavours is that we have one pre-eminent,
pressing need above all other needs, which is to Find God. When we
have accomplished this we discover without any further teaching
that we no longer care to pass our time with air-balls, because they
appear so paltry, so inadequate. We are grown up and are no longer
puerile in our desires: at the same time we are not without desires,
but, on the contrary, we glow with a new, more ardent, and larger set
of desires.
V
What I know of the soul's actual Finding and Contact with God I
keep very closely to myself. Here and there to a few, a very few
souls, I may speak: to all others I am forbidden to speak. I am
stopped; and I understand perfectly why this is: it is that I should do
more harm than good. Anyone looking at me would say (and all the
more so because I am dressed in the fashion of the day, and not in
some peculiar way, or in a nun's habit, for such trifling things affect
many minds), "That person is demented to think that she knows
what it is to have Contact with God," and it would seem a scandal to
them. But the explanation of the mystery is not so simple as this. I
am not demented. I never was so sane, so capable in my life as now.
I never was so perfectly poised as now. But if you say to me,
"Explain what it is that you know, in order that I too may know,"
then I can say to you nothing more than, "Come and know for
yourself, for God awaits you."
To illustrate a mere fraction of the difficulty of passing such a
knowledge from one self to another self, let us take such a case as
that of a man born blind. He sits beneath a tree, on the grass. You
put a blade of grass in his fingers, and also a leaf from the tree, and
you say to him, "This is grass, and this is the leaf of the tree which
shelters you, and both are green." "And what," he asks, "is green?"
And to save your life you cannot make him know what it is, or make
him know the tree, or know the grass, though he touches them both
with his hands. How, then, shall God, Who can be neither seen, nor
heard, nor touched, how shall He be made known from one to
another? He must be experienced to be known. And if you should
say to me, "What does it feel like to have found God?" then I should
say, "It feels that the roof is lifted off the world, and wherever we
may be or stand it is a straight line from us to God and nothing
between, nothing between, day or night."
VI
To come to the contemplation of God it is not necessary to go
through any lengthy toil, some process of throwing out this or that,
painfully, slowly, denying the existence of everything in order to
arrive at God. The way is not denying, but concentrating; and in the
act of concentration, because of love, all other things whatsoever in
creation fall away into nothing and are no more, because God in all
His graciousness reveals Himself, and then He alone exists for the
enraptured soul.
VII
Supposing that we have found Jesus Christ, supposing that we know
Him so well and have come to love Him so much that our love for
Him is become stronger than any other love, very much stronger
than any other love, and still, in spite of hopes and endeavours, we
know that we have not found the Godhead, we have not found
Union with the First and Third Person of the Holy Trinity--the
heavens have not, as it were, been opened to us to let our souls slip
through to God. Are we to be discouraged because of this? Are we
to think ourselves less favoured, less loved? A thousand times no.
We are, perhaps, in neither heart, mind, or soul quite sufficiently
prepared for the great ordeals that must be gone through _after
Union with God,_ To find God is Victory. But Victory has dangers.
We have perhaps not yet sufficiently developed just those exact
qualities which it is essential we must have in order to _maintain_
the connection with God in the face of all obstacles when once He is
found. When God reveals Himself to a soul she is in great danger,
and she knows it, because to fail Him now, to turn away now, to be
unfaithful now--this is a terrible disaster to the soul. God in His
mercy exposes no soul to such dangers until she is as ready as may
be, but He bides and He works in her till she is ready. So it may very
well be that it is not in this life that we come to Union, but later; and
the fact that we have not come to Union is a sign to increase our
nearness to Christ by as much as we can: the very smallest advance
that we make in this life is of the utmost value to us later.
VIII
The soul that is seeking Union with God must not, upon any pretext
whatever, engage itself in spiritualism. Spiritualism may have its
great uses for the heart and mind which are without, or are
struggling for, belief--the heart and mind of Thomas seeking to
touch, to have a proof; but remember the words of the Saviour to
Thomas: "Blessed are they," He says, "who have not seen, and yet
have believed." And we do not need to wait for death to receive this
blessing, but we receive it here. The soul that would find God must
go to Him by means of His Holy Spirit, and no other spirit but the
Spirit of God can take us to Him; and to try to hold communications
with the spirits of men _is not the way._ The soul that has come to
Union with God is perfectly aware of the existence of spirits--is
intensely aware,--but refuses to pay any attention if she wise. Some
of these spirits are very subtle, very knowing; some are full of
flattery, and very persistent; others present themselves as still in
human form, and seek to terrify with their terrible faces, some
diabolical, some appearing to be in a great agony and undergoing
changes more astonishing and horrible than can be even imagined
before experienced--and melting only to be re-formed into that
which is yet more fearful. Have nothing whatever to do with spirits.
Do not resist them when they come, but drop them behind by fixing
heart, mind, and soul on Christ. The Spirit of Christ easily
overcomes every spirit, every evil, every fear, and in order to
ourselves overcome all such things, we need to unite with the Spirit
of Jesus Christ by concentrating upon Him with love, and ignoring
obstructions. Those who have lent themselves to spiritualism,
hoping to find comfort, a lost friend, or even God Himself, when
they give it up (as they must do) they may find themselves greatly
plagued by the fires with which they have been playing; but these
can soon be overcome by diligently uniting the heart and mind to
Jesus Christ.
IX
After coming to full Union with God, the mind becomes
permanently attached to Him, _and this without effort;_ but in order
that it shall be without effort, the will must be kept in a state of
loving attention to Him, and this again can only be done without
effort if the heart is so full of love that it desires nothing else than
God; and this is dependent again upon the grace which the soul
receives from Him because of her love and response--so now we see,
living and working in our own being, the reason and meaning of His
commandment to love Him with all the heart, mind, soul, and
strength. It is doing this _after He has Himself given us the power to
do it_ which makes us able to live in the closest, most delicious and
precious nearness to God during all our waking hours. But it takes
time, and it takes much pain to learn how to live this, as it were,
double life--this inward life of companionship, of wonderful and
blessed inward intercourse with God, and the outward intercourse of
the senses with the world, our everyday duties, and our
fellow-beings. In our early stages we have profound innumerable
difficulties in understanding either our own capacities or God's
wishes: we are terrified of losing Him, and yet are often bewildered,
and pained also, by some of the higher degrees in which He
communicates Himself. We do not understand how to leave God and
return to earthly duties. Supposing that we are altogether wrapped
up in the company of God, and some fellow-being suddenly recalls
us to the world (the human voice can recall the soul as nothing else
can), the pain is so great as to be nothing less than anguish; and if
done often would seriously affect the health of the body.
But in a few years we learn to accomplish it without any shock.
One pain, however, remains, and it grows. I find myself unable to
carry on a conversation with anyone unless it is about God, or about
some work which is for God and has to do with His pleasure (and
this is rare, because people are so glued to worldly affairs), for more
than an hour, and even less, without the most horrible, the most
deathly, exhaustion, which is not only spiritual but bodily--the face
and lips losing all colour, the eyes their vitality: so dreadful is the
distress of the whole being that one is obliged, upon any kind of
pretext, to withdraw from all companions, and, if it is only for five
minutes, be alone with God and, where no eye but His can see, unite
completely with Him once more, and immediately the whole being
becomes revivified. There is nothing else in life so wonderful, so
rapturous as this swift reunion of the soul with God; and the joy is
not only the joy of the soul, because the heart and mind have their
fill of it too, for they too have ached and thirsted and hungered and
longed, and now are satisfied.
If this measureless happiness could only be imagined by us before
we experience it, how many of us would be spurred to greater efforts
instead of falling back amongst the dust and cobwebs of Vanity!--but
it cannot be imagined, and the only way to come to it is by faith
and obedience; and it is easy to see why this arrangement is
necessary, for if we could imagine it thoroughly, then we should
probably try to get to God only on account of greed, and should find
ourselves drifting away instead of towards Him; it cannot be done
by greed, greed being one of those things which beguiled the soul
away from Him to begin with; and He does not send the soul His
favours till she is free of, and has risen above, the dangers of greed
and seeks Him for Himself and not for His favours. As soon as it is
safe for her He will give the soul continual favours, because Perfect
Love is ever desirous to give, and is only restrained on our account
to withhold favours. The soul which knows how to make all
necessary preparations to receive Him becomes a source of joy to
God, for now He can give and give and no harm be done to that soul;
but He does not acquaint the soul too suddenly with all the joy that
she is to Him, because she would not (at least certainly my soul
would not) be able to bear the knowledge of the privilege that she
enjoys, without some danger to herself,--and so, all unaware of the
singularity of the privilege that she enjoys without any analysis of
her happiness, she concerns herself with sweetly obeying Him, with
singing to Him, and with giving Him all that she has all the day long,
and so hovers before Him as delightful simplicity and love.
This Union with God varies so much in degree that it makes an
effect of endless variety. Yet it is all one same joy, it is the joy of
angels reduced to such degree as makes it bearable to flesh: the soul
knows that it is the joy of angels that she is receiving the first time
that she has it given to her: immediately on receipt of this joy she
comprehends the _mode_ of heavenly living; she knows it is but the
outer edge that she touches, but what means so much to her is that
she has _recaptured the knowledge of this mode of living:_
henceforth it is a question of progress, she bends all her attention to
progress so that she may get nearer and nearer to God, so that she
may do everything to please this suddenly refound, unspeakably
beloved God.
She desires to get nearer and nearer to God in spite of the pain that
she often experiences. Perhaps the first pains we experience are
when we are in contemplation of God and are caught by God into
High Contemplation. He will at times expose the soul to so much of
the Divine Power that she cannot sever herself from the too great
fulness of Union with God, though the body is crying to her to do it
and the sufferings of the body are all felt by the soul, which is pulled
two ways: all this is very painful and makes us almost in a _fear_ of
God again. Why should Perfect Love inflict this pain on us? It may
be to remind us that He is not only Love, but Power, Might, Majesty,
and Dominion also. Yet could this ever be forgotten? It seems
incredible. But it does not do to trust to one's soul, or to count on
what she will do or not do: we know that the soul has forgotten
almost everything about God, so much so that we are now thankful
to arrive even so far as being quite certain that He exists! What
infinite kindness that He should consent and condescend to Himself
be her Teacher! But He does so condescend, and the more the soul
relearns of God, the more she also learns that He is never weary of
working for us all: this keeps the soul in a state of intense gratitude.
* * *
When the soul arrives at Union with God, does she remain always in
Union? Yes, but not at the degree of Union which is Contact. What
is the difference? It can perhaps be most easily explained (though
extremely imperfectly) by referring to the union of married life. In
this union, though we live in one house, we are not always both in
that house at the same time; but this does not dissolve our union, and
we both know our way to return there, and the right to meet is
always ours. When we are both in the house, although not in the
same room, there is a much nearer feeling about it, and we are apt to
give a momentary call one to the other, just to have the pleasure of
response: yet, though we are aware the other one is in the house and
that there is no part of the house where we are forbidden to meet--it
is not enough; love requires more: it will be necessary for one to go
and seek the actual presence of the other (the soul does this by a
quiet prayer with perhaps a few words, but more probably no words).
The one finds the other one; but the other one is occupied, so the one
waits patiently (this is passive contemplation), and suddenly the
occupied one is so constrained by love for the waiting one that he
must turn to her, open wide his arms, and embrace her--they meet,
they touch, they are content. In spiritual life this is contact or ecstasy
or rapture. Here comes in the immensity of the difference between
joys physical and joys spiritual--physical joys being limited to five
senses: spiritual joys being above senses and open to limitless
variations; but in order that these may be known in their fulness, we
must eventually (after leaving the flesh) rise to immense heights of
perfection: the joys enjoyed by the Archangel would _destroy_ a
lesser angel: the degree of joy that invigorates the saint, that sends
him into rhapsodies of happiness, would _destroy_ the sinner--(becoming
insupportable agony to the sinner). This celestial joy is,
fundamentally, a question of the enduring of some un-nameable
energy. How can energy be a means of this immeasurable Divine
joy? After years of experience I find I cannot go back upon the
knowledge that I acquired on the very first occasion of
experience--that energy _is a fundamental principle of the mystery._
But how, it may very well be asked, do sins interfere with the
reception of this activity? Sins are all imperfections, thickenings of
the soul from self-will: pure soul is necessary for the _happy_
reception of this celestial activity, and because impurities are
automatically dissipated by this activity, and the dissipation or
dispersion of them _is the most awful agony conceivable_ when too
suddenly done, what is bliss to the saint is the extremity of torture to
the sinner. Now we come very fearfully and dreadfully to
understand something more of the meanings, the happenings, of the
Judgment Day. Christ will inflict no direct wilful punishment on any
soul; but when He presents Himself before all souls and they behold
His Face, immediately they will receive the terrible might of the
activity of celestial joy. The regenerated will endure and rejoice; the
unrepentant sinner will agonise, and he must flee from before the
Face of Christ, because the agony that he feels is the dispersal of his
imperfect soul; and where shall the sinner flee, where shall he go to
find happiness? for saint and sinner alike desire happiness, and there
is in Spirit-life only one happiness--the Bliss of God. So then let us
be careful to prepare ourselves to be able to receive and endure this
happiness, even if it can at first be only in a small degree, so that we
shall not be condemned _by our own pain_ to leave the Presence of
God altogether and consequently lose Celestial Pleasures; let us at
least prepare ourselves to remain near enough to know something of
this tremendous living.
It was this Divine Activity which on the night of the Too Great
Happiness so anguished my imperfect soul. But that night, and that
anguish, taught my soul what she could never have learnt by any
other means, and what it was I learnt I find myself unable to pass on
to anyone; but that night was for my soul the turning-point of her
destiny, that night altered my soul for evermore; that night I knew
God as deeply as He can be known whilst the soul is in flesh.
* * *
God uses also a peculiar drawing power. All souls feeling desire
towards God are to a greater or lesser degree conscious of this, and,
as we know, frequently remain conscious of it as a desire and
nothing further to the end of life in flesh. By means of it He draws a
soul towards Himself until, because of it, the whole being is willing
to make efforts at self-improvement, and this is the essential: it is
this cleaning up of the character, this purification, which alone can
bring us to the point where we can receive God's communications of
Himself (in other words, ecstasies and periods of reunion with
Celestial-living). Ecstasies inspire and awaken the soul: they
convince the mind absolutely of the existence of another form of
living _and of God Himself._
After ecstasy the efforts of the entire being are bent on trying to
perfect itself, and extraordinary Graces may be freely and almost
continually given to us in order to make improvement more rapid for
us. The feeling for God which before ecstasy was a deep (and often
very painful) longing for God now increases to a burning,
never-ceasing desire for Him: only three thoughts can be said to truly
occupy a person from this stage onwards--how to please God, how
to get nearer to Him, how to show practical gratitude. He may
increase the flow of His Power to a soul till she is in great distress,
longing to leap out of the body owing to the immensity of God's
attraction. This attraction at times has a very real and sensible effect
upon the body: it feels to counteract gravity, it makes the body feel
so light it is about to leave the ground; it affects walking, and
unaccountably changes it to staggering. To receive this attraction
can be an ecstatic condition, but is by no means ecstasy. So long as
we have power to move the body by will we are not in true ecstasy.
In ecstasy the body feels to be disconnected in some unaccountable
manner from the will; it lies inert, though it knows itself and knows
that it stills lives--which fundamentally differentiates it from sleep,
because in sleep we do not know our body, we do not know if we
are alive or dead, we know nothing. In ecstasy is no such blankness:
merely the body is perforce inert, it would be entirely forgotten but
for its periods of distress.
Neither can ecstasy be confused with dreaming, by even the most
simple person. In dreaming, objects and events of a familiar type
still surround us; the total inconsequence with which they present
themselves alone makes dream-living unlike actual living, for it
remains fundamentally of the same type--physical and full of
persons, forms, objects, and word-thoughts. We can procure sleep
by willing it, but we cannot will to procure ecstasy: we find it totally
independent of will.
The Attraction of God can be a penetrating pain, because the soul,
terribly drawn to God, exceedingly near Him, yet remains
unsatisfied even in this close proximity. Why? Because she is being
subjected to one Force only--she longs, she remains near, and
receives nothing. God is not bestowing His Activity upon her, which
is the way that she "knows" Him--she is not living the celestial life.
It is the combination of the two Forces working together
simultaneously on and in the soul which differentiates ecstasy and
rapture from all other degrees of God-Consciousness. When these
two Powers work together, we experience celestial living, full Union,
the bliss of Contact. It cannot possibly be said that in ecstasy we see
God: it is a question of "knowing" Him through the higher part of
the soul, in lesser or in deeper degrees.
X
If the Divine Lover gives such joys to the soul, how does the soul
give joy to the Divine Lover? Is she beautiful? She becomes so.
Also the soul is a poet of the first water, though she uses no words;
and the soul is a weaver of melodies, though she makes no sound;
but above all, and before all, the soul is a great lover. Now we know
in this earthly life that a lover desires above everything else the love
of her whom he loves. Only when she whom he loves returns his
love, can he truly enjoy her.
So also the Divine Lover. O incomparable Love! Love gives all
when it gives itself, love receives all when it receives Love.
By love, then, the soul is the Delight of God.
XI
The soul feels to be formless; though we become aware of a
_spreading_ which causes her to feel of the form of a cup or a disc
when she receives God, and in contemplation she feels to
extend--flame-like until she meets God. She can wait for God--spread,
but cannot maintain this form for long without God rejoices her by His
touch. How can so formless a thing, still waiting for its Spiritual
Body, be beautiful? She is beautiful because of the colours she is
able to assume: she can glow with such colour as no flower on earth
can even faintly imitate. Celestial colours are beyond all imagination.
As the soul grows in purity and is able to endure an increase of the
Divine Radiations and Penetration, so she changes her colours; by
her colours she delights the eye of her Maker, He touches her, she
becomes yet more beautiful.
* * *
Very early in the morning God walks in His Garden of Souls, and in
the evening also, and in the noonday, and in the night.
The soul that knows Him knows His approach, and, preparing and
adorning herself for Him--waits.
XII
Does God come and go? The soul feels Him there, and not there. Is
she mistaken in this, and God always to be possessed, but she not
dressed to receive Him? If this is so, then how grievously frequent is
our failure!
It is more encouraging to our own state to suppose that God lends
Himself and withdraws; that He will be possessed; and He will not
be. But this involves caprice. Can Perfect Love have caprice?
We find that grace can be received without intermission for weeks,
even months, together. Without coming and departing (although in
lesser and greater intensity) the Presence of God, Love and Comfort,
envelop the soul. So then we learn by our own experience that God
is willing to be present amongst us continually in His Second and
Third Persons.
Yet, although He is present in His Two Persons, the soul is not filled:
she is unspeakably blest and happy, but not wholly satisfied till He
is present to her in His First Person also. She knows immediately
when He so comes, and then the Three become One, and when They
become One to her, in that moment the soul enters Bliss. It is true
that if He so came to her very frequently, the soul could not endure
Him; but certainly she could endure Him more frequently than she
receives Him. It is not because she is worthy that she possesses Him:
the soul never, under any circumstances, feels worthy: it is love
alone which enables her to possess Him, and this love that she
knows how to shed to Him is His own gift to her.
So the soul cries to Him, O mystery of love, was ever such sweet
graciousness as lives in thee: such exquisite felicity of giving and
receiving, in which the giver and receiver in mysterious rapture of
generosity are oned! And this mystery of love is not in paucity of
ways, but in marvellous variety of ways and of degrees--the ways of
friendship, the brother and the sister, the mother and the child, the
youth and the maiden, and Thyself and we.
Love makes the soul ponder on His tastes, His will, His nature. Does
He prefer even in heaven to possess Himself to Himself in His First
Person? or are there parts of heaven where He is ever willing to be
possessed in His fulness: where He is eternally beheld in His Three
Persons by such as can endure Him? The soul believes it, and this is
the goal she strives for both now and hereafter.
Yet there is That of Him which is for ever Alone, which will never
be known or shared by the greatest of the Angels. The soul
comprehends that He will have it so because of that Solitary which
sits within herself, she who is made after His likeness.
XIII
For many years before coming to Union with God, I found that it
had become impossible to say more than a little prayer of some five
or six words, and these were said very slowly: at times I was
astonished at my inability, and ashamed that these pitiful shreds
were all that I could offer, and always the same thing too; I tried to
vary it--I could not. When I tried to say some fine sentence, when I
tried even to ask for something, I could not; it all disappeared in a
feeling of such sweet love for God, and I merely said again the same
old words of every day. I loved. I could do nothing more than say so,
and then stay there on my knees for a little while, very near Him,
fascinated, adoring. But God is not vexed with a soul when she
cannot say much. Is an earthly father vexed when his child, standing
there before him, forgets the words upon its lips, forgets to ask,
because it loves him so? Far from it.
This prayer is the commencement, the foretaste, of Contemplation.
A distinguishing mark between this prayer and Contemplation is that
in even the lowest degree of Contemplation God (if one may so
express the inexpressible) is Localised. Hitherto His Presence has
been near--but we cannot say how near, or where, and _we cannot
be sure of finding it._ After Union we are certain of finding God's
Presence everywhere, and at any time. He may at times be far away,
or pay no attention to us; but we know whereabouts He is, and we
can go and wait outside that place where He has hidden Himself and
which is no place (but a figure of speech): He merely disappears
from our consciousness, but not so entirely but that we can partly
find Him. All this cannot be explained, but after Union God is as
present to the soul in Contemplation (and far more so because of the
great poignancy of it) as is a fellow-creature whom we actually see
and touch, much more so because between ourself and a fellow-creature,
however dear, is always a barrier: try as we may there is always
a dividing line between two persons. We are two: we remain
two. But when we meet God there is nothing between us and God,
nothing whatever divides us, and yet we are not lost in God--that is
to say, we do not disappear as a living individual consciousness, but
our consciousness is increased to a prodigious degree, and we are
One with God.
XIV
This Oneness, in a tiny degree, can be experienced by two persons
who are in close spiritual sympathy when both are simultaneously
and powerfully animated by very loving thoughts of Christ, or are
working together, and _giving_ on account of Christ: then a fluid
interchange of sympathies and interests takes place in which the
barriers of individuality go down.
This same fluid interchange in a still lesser degree takes place in
ordinary friendship between two friends of similar tastes; but this
interchange must always be with the mental and the higher part of us,
it can never take place because of the merely physical, for in the
physical, dependent as it is upon senses, barriers always exist: we
see this in the union of lovers--their union is merely a transitory
_self_-gratification, although it may include another self in that it is
mutual; but more frequently it is not even mutual, and what is a
pleasure to one is at the moment distasteful to the other, though the
one can easily conceal from the other that it is so, proving
how complete the duality of consciousness and of feeling
remains between two individuals who depend upon contiguity of
_substance_ (or the sense of touch) for their union, and not upon
spiritual _similarity_: in spiritual similarity alone is _identity_ of
feeling and personality and perfect union to be found, and in this
identity _deceit is impossible._
XV
The more we investigate the question of satisfactions the more we
find that these, in order to be permanent, must take place upon a
very high level, upon a plane above materialism. However much we
may with our sense of taste enjoy a dinner to-day, it will be no joy
whatever even a week hence. The natural everyday facts should (and
are intended to) prove to us the futility of giving so much time and
thought to the pleasures of the flesh: these pleasures lead nowhere,
they end abruptly, they are very limited, being confined to five
senses, and consequently, owing to a necessity of continual
repetition, satiety supervenes, and there remains nothing else to turn
to. Yet when this happens we are really very fortunate, because it
may be a cause of our searching amongst our higher faculties for our
gratifications.
XVI
The soul finds it bitterly hard to rid herself of selfishness and
self-will: she gets rid of one form, only to find herself falling to
another. When first my soul reknew the Joy of God I said to myself, "I
will hide it in my own bosom, I will keep it all to myself. I am become
independent of all creatures, I want none of them, I cannot bear the
sight or the sound of them, how joyfully I leave them all behind!--I
want only my God--I want--But what is all this?--I want, I will, I, I,
I, I!" Later the days come when God hides Himself from me: I can
go and wait at His threshold (because when she knows the way He
never denies the soul the threshold, though He denies her Himself). I
may pour out all the sweetness of my love, but he makes no
response; I may sing to Him all day: He will not hear; I may give
Him all that I am or have, and He will not communicate Himself to
me. Then I remember all the years of my striving, I remember the
stress, the sweat of all that climb to His footstool--the sweat that at
times was like drops of blood wrung out of the soul, out of the heart,
out of the mind; and yet all forgotten in the instant of the rapture of
Finding. Did He then beckon and draw and delight the soul only to
madden with the anguish of more hiding and more striving: was He
to be found only that He might again be lost? My soul sickened with
fear, and I said, Love is a calamity; who can release me from the
anguish of it? O God, since I may no more possess Thee, grant that I
may shortly pass into the dust and for ever be no more, so that I may
escape this pain of knowing Thy Perfections and my own necessity
for Thee; and I mourned for Him till my health went.
Weeks passed, and three words came constantly to me: "Visit my
sick." But I did not listen: I was sick myself with a deadly wound.
Almost every day the same three words came; but I turned away
resentfully from them, saying to myself, "What have the sick to do
with me? I am weary of sick people: I have been so much with them.
Must I accept the sick in place of the ecstasy of God? I mourn for
the loss of God. I can cheer no sick."
The words came again, with excessive gentleness, and the
gentleness was like the gentleness of Christ, and it pierced. So that
day I go to the village and visit the sick again, and I look at them
tenderly and lovingly, and tenderly and lovingly they look at me,
and some say, "It is as if God came into the house with you"; and
tears come to my eyes, and I say, "It may be so, because He sent
me," and they gaze at me lovingly, and lovingly I gaze at them; and
it seems to me that I can no longer tell where "they" cease and where
"I" begin, and the sweetness, the peculiar sweetness, of Christ
pierces me through from my head to my feet--that sweetness that I
have not known for weeks. And so I comprehend that Holy Love is
not alone just Thee and me, but it is also Thee and me and the others,
and Thee and the others and me.
* * *
I wanted my own way. The way I wanted was to be free in order to
worship and bless God in a beautiful place, in some place that _I_
should choose. I wanted to worship Him, and to sing Him the Song
of the Soul from some quiet hill among the olive trees by the
Mediterranean Sea. I wanted this marvellous, this almost terrible,
joy of meeting God in a beautiful place that _I_ should choose: I
wanted it so that it became spiritual greed--spiritual self-indulgence.
Duty, heavy-winged duty, prevented my taking the journey; duty to
an always-contrary relation, now unwell. It was only a little
thing--just a journey prevented, but it crossed my self-will; and in an
impatient, detestable way that I have, I wanted to push all duty, even
all human relationships, anywhere upon one side, or over the edge of
the world, so they might all fall together out of my sight and I be
free!
Because I thought these thoughts, I came to the Place of Tribulation.
And the Messenger came, and he said, "Escape, and the way is
consenting." But I said, "No, I will not have that way, I will escape
by some other way." So I tried every other way, but found it guarded
by something which seemed to be armed with a hammer; but I
persisted: then for days and nights my soul stood up to the hammers
and received terrible blows, and still I persisted--I would find a way
to escape that should please my will. But I could not eat, I could not
sleep, the flesh visibly lessened on my bones, and at last I loathed
myself and my own will and my own soul, and I cried to God, "Shall
I never be through with this terrible struggle with self-will?" and
groaned aloud in my despair.
Then the words that were sent long ago to a saint, and that he was
inspired to write down to help us all, now came and did their work
for me through him: "My grace is sufficient for thee." And so I
found it, and more than sufficient--when I consented.
Who is it, what is it, that so punishes the soul? Is it God? No.
Patiently, lovingly He waits. Our pain is the difficulty of consenting
to perfection: every virtue has a hammer, every perfection a long
two-edged sword; and the punishment we feel is the breaking and
wounding of self-will under the hammers of the virtues and the
sword-thrusts of the vision of perfection.
Put aside these wretched, these sometimes awful and terrible, battles
and punishments, shrink from them when they come, and we may
put aside salvation. Accept them--stand up to the hammer and take
the blows and learn: consent to the sword that pierces up to the hilt,
and what do we come to?--The Blisses of God.
PART V
I
After coming to Union with God, our prayers become entirely
changed, not only in the manner of presenting them, but changed
also in what is presented. Petitioning is a hard thing. I had found it
easy to pray for others whether I loved them or not, with the lips and
with some of the heart; but I found that I could not do it in the new
way, with all my heart, mind, soul, and strength, so that everything
else fled away into nothing and was no more, except that for which I
petitioned God. A perfect concentration for the welfare of a stranger
or of some cause was a very hard thing; yet I was made aware that I
must learn to do it.
For two or three years I suffered pain and exhaustion over this
petitioning; I would be so fatigued by it, found it so great a strain,
that I said to myself, "I shall lose my health over this petitioning, for
as I do it, it is as though I gave my life-energy for the cause or
person for whom I pray." But my Good Angel whispered me not to
give in, but continue to be willing, continue to be generous, no
matter the cost. I am not generous, but I went on with it, and secretly
had the greatest dread of it; my whole nature shrank from the effort,
from the strange loss of vitality this petitioning brought.
Then at last, after more than two years, because of remaining willing,
because of trying to remain generous about this, to me, most
grievously hard prayer, one happy day God lifted away all the strain
and difficulty, all the pain and fatigue, and turned it into the sweetest
of prayers: into a new song, a new honey, new music, a new delight,
in which the soul has, as it were, but to sip at the nectar of His Love
and Beneficence, to bring it to a fellow-soul.
I found that God causes the soul to pray this joyous, this exquisite,
prayer for total strangers, passers-by in the street, fellow-travellers
by road and rail, here and there, this one and that, she knows which
one it is: how surprised these persons would be if they knew that a
total stranger, who never saw them before and never will see them
again, was joyously, lovingly, holding them up before God for His
help and His blessing! and they receive His blessing. God does not
prompt such prayers for nothing. Is this favoritism? No; they are
secretly seeking Him.
II
When the soul is united to God a great change comes over the mind,
which now thinks continually, lovingly, of God. God not merely
hoped for, looked for, as in the past, but God found and known, God
close and near; interruptions come and go, but the mind, like a
pendulum, swings back to God, nothing stops it; the soul streams to
Him: she discovers Him everywhere: she knows her way to Him,
and she has not far to go. Her own door is also His door. There are
many degrees of intensity about this condition, which can increase
to such an extent as to entirely interfere with our everyday duties.
When it is increased to this degree it would appear (certainly at
times) to be on purpose to teach the soul a self-abnegation which she
could not otherwise learn, because, together with an intense, almost
terrible, attraction and desire to be alone with God, will come the
pressure of a duty which it is obvious God would wish us to attend
to: this is a severe and a very continual lesson to the soul--the lesson
of learning patiently to continue some sordid work in this world,
after finding the joys of the spiritual life.
What are amongst the most noticeable changes in the mind? first, we
notice it has become very simple in its requirements, and very
restful; it no longer darts here and there gathering in this and that of
fancied treasures, as a bird darts at flies; it has dropped outside
objects, in order to hover around thoughts of God, which at the same
time are not particularised, but, as it were, quietly, contentedly, float
in a general and peaceful fragrance of beauty.
Ordinarily the mind would find it difficult to hover in this way with
such a singleness of intent, but in certain other cases we see the
same contentment--in the mother beside her babe: though she may
not talk to it, or touch it, she is happy; she knows it near; she is
secretly giving to it. We see it in the babe also: it gazes at its mother
and is quiet; if the mother removes herself, the child may cry; no
one has hurt it--merely, it has ceased to be happy because the object
of its desire has gone too far from it, has disappeared. We see it also
in two lovers; they sit near together, and the more they love the
fewer words they require to speak: they are happy: they require very
few words, very few thoughts. Separate them, and they spend their
time uneasily in sending messages, in thinking numberless yearning
thoughts which become painful, and, if continued for long, can
affect the health. Put them together again, and they barely say two
words: their joy at meeting occupies the whole of their attention. It
is the same when we love God. The heart, and the mind, and the soul
are blissfully content, they are in a love-state, they bask in His
Presence; but that we should be aware of His Presence--this is His
gift, this is the vast difference between our former and our present
state.
When we have become experienced in this Presence of God, the
Reason tries very earnestly to comprehend the manner of it. Christ
says that when love is established between God and a man, "My
Father and I will come to him and make our abode with him." How
can such a tremendous thing as this be carried out without, as it were,
burning the man up with the greatness of it? Does God, then, when
experienced feel to be a Fire? Yes, and no, for we feel that we shall
be consumed, and yet it is not burning but a blissful energy of the
most inexpressible and unbearable intensity, which has the feeling
of disintegrating or _dispersing flesh._ The experience is blissful to
heart and mind only so long as it is given within certain limits:
beyond this it is bliss-agony, beyond this it would soon be death to
the body; and the soul feels that in her imperfect state it can soon
easily be the dispersion of herself also: this is a very terrible feeling:
this does not bear remembering or thinking about. How, then, can it
be possible that God can take up His abode with us and we still live?
In all contacts with God we notice one fact pre-eminently--they do
not take place with the mind, but with that which was previously
unknown to us, and which communicates the joy and the realities of
meeting God to the mind. What is this? It does not live in the heart:
it lives, or feels to live, in the upper cavity of the chest, above the
heart, and below the throat-base. It can endure God. It is spirit, it
feels to be a higher part of the soul: we might call it the Intelligence
and Will of the soul, because it acts for the soul as the mind acts for
the body, it is above the soul as the mind is above (more important
than) and rules an arm or leg. The more we experience God, the
more we are forced to comprehend that we have in us an especial
organ in this spirit with which we can communicate with God and
by which we can receive Him without the mind or body being
destroyed. For when God takes up His abode with a man He will
communicate Himself to this loving Spirit-Will or Intelligence in
ecstasies. And through His Son He will communicate Himself in
another manner, to the heart and mind, so graciously, with such a
tender care, that without the stress of ecstasy we are kept in a
delicate and most blessed Awareness of God. In these ways we can
know, even in flesh, the beginnings of the true love-state, the
beginnings of the angelic state, which is this same love-state brought
_to completion by Beholding God._
III
Although this blessed condition of Awareness of God is a gift, and
at first the mind and soul are maintained in it without effort on their
part, it being accomplished for them solely by the power of the
Grace of God, yet later--and somewhat to their dismay after
receiving such favours--they discover that it must be worked for in
order to be maintained. The heart must give, the mind must give, the
soul must give: when they neither work nor give they may find
themselves receiving nothing: God ceases to be present to them.
Generosity on our part is required. It works out in experience to be
always the same thing that is needed for our perfect health and
happiness--reciprocity. Without we maintain this reciprocity we
shall experience _extraordinary disappointment._
IV
The soul is now blind: we know this by experience; but do we know
that she ever had sight? If she did not, but was created imperfect,
and was so created in order that only by work and merit she should
arrive at completion and perfection and Behold God (instead of
merely, as now in this world, being able only to apprehend Him by
the retrospect of His effect upon her), then she was always below
angels. If through work and obedience she becomes so raised that
she merits sight and the actual Beholding of God, then she becomes
equal to angels because of this Beholding; and so Christ tells us that
she does as the Child of the Resurrection.
It is the inability of the soul to comprehend, after experiencing the
bliss of Union with God, how she came to embark upon this
wandering and separation, which so presses the Reason for an
explanation of the fall of the soul.
It may be that not all souls are fallen, but that some are merely in
process of progressing to sight. These are Righteous Souls. But there
are more souls also created sightless, who are fallen by curiosity, by
infidelity or plain self-will and forgetfulness--these it is who need
the Redeemer: "I come not to call the Righteous, but sinners to
repentance." From this it would seem that there are souls who,
though they are in this world, are yet fundamentally righteous: not
fallen, but working to receive sight. It is inconceivable to the soul
that, had she ever Beheld God, she could have left Him, but not
inconceivable to her that, having never Beheld Him, she may have
been unfaithful on her road to Sight. She understands this awful
possibility after coming to Union with Him from this earth, because
then she learns the immense difficulties of maintaining this sightless
Union.
She knows the terrible solitude and testing it entails, and the
innumerable temptations when low-spirited and lonely to turn to
interests and consolations apart from God; for God will frequently,
in the later stages of progress, withhold every consolation and
comfort from the soul, leaving her solitary. Will she stay? Will she
go?
V
We hope for much from "education"; but what education is it that
will be of enduring value to us? Is it the education which teaches us
the grammars of foreign languages, scientific facts, the dates when
wars were won, when kings ascended their thrones, princes died,
artists painted their masterpieces, that will bring us to our finest
opportunities of success? To the soul there is little greater or less
chance of success offered by the degree of "polish" in the education
we have the money to procure: the peasant who cannot read or write
may achieve the purpose of life before the savant: we know it
without caring to acknowledge it to ourselves: the education that we
really require is the education of daily conduct, the education of
character, the education by which we say to Self-will, to Pride, and
to Lusts, "Lie down!"--and they do it!
* * *
When a soul knows herself, has repented and become redeemed, she
knows all other souls, good or bad: there are no longer any secrets
for her, no one can hide himself from her: she sees all these open
and living books, reads them, and avoids judging and bitterness in
spite of the selfishness, stupidity, and frailty revealed on every page:
she finds the same faults in herself; selfishness, stupidity, and
weakness are engraven upon herself; the redeemed and enlightened
soul with tears perpetually corrects these faults: the unenlightened
soul does not--this is the difference between them.
VI
For some time after coming to Union with God we remain
convinced that all now being so well with the soul all will be well
with the body also, and the health does improve and become more
stable; but the day comes when we learn that God is not concerned
with saving flesh, and that the body must share the usual fate--we
shall continue to suffer through it. But we also discover that there
can be a marvellous amelioration to this suffering. By raising the
consciousness to its highest--that is to say, by living with the highest
part of the soul _and waiting upon God_--we can experience such
very great Grace that the poignancy, the distress, of pain disappears.
For instance, the following is from my experience. Trouble has
come, trouble of several kinds: the death of one very dear; severe
illness to another; for my brother a serious operation; for myself a
slight one, but a very painful one--in fine, a variety of trials all
coming together as they have a way of doing. I feel terribly nervous
and fearful of the pain of my own operation and my brother's also:
he is the brother who once saved my life, he is the being who more
than anyone on earth I have most loved since early childhood. So I
hang on to God. I hang to Him, not by beseeching Him to relieve or
release me from any of these inevitable happenings, but by the way I
have so slowly been learning, in which a creature, by means and
because of love, passes out of itself and is able to hand over to God
everything which it is or has or thinks or does, and in exchange
receives His Peace. So I hand over my brother and my dead and my
anxieties for self into His hands, and I go to my operation with the
same serenity that I should go to meet a friend. I notice that I am
more calm, less nervous, than anyone else.
The anaesthetic fails before the operation is completed:
consciousness returns and becomes aware of atrocious pain and
blood-soaked busy instruments. Yet by Grace of God the mind and
soul are able immediately to raise and maintain themselves in high
consciousness of God, and the operation can be finished without a
cry or movement of the body: no automatic shrinking takes place.
And this Grace is continued for days afterwards, so that in recalling
the torturing incidents, and though the pain of wounds continues
severe enough to interfere with sleep, yet my mind remains quite
calm, like a quiet lake over which, without ruffling its waters, hangs
a mist--a tranquil shroud of pain that has no sting, no fear, no fret.
VII
After coming to Union with God I _never lacked anything,_ and this
during the most difficult times of the war, and under every and all
circumstances. Being careful to try and observe how this was
worked, I saw it was very naturally and simply done by everyone
being given an impulse to help me, always without any request to
them on my part: the porter, besieged by twenty persons, would be
blind to all and, coming straight to me, would offer his service; the
taxi-driver, hailed by a waiting mob, had eyes and ears for no one
but myself, yet I had made him no sign except by looking at him.
The same with the coal merchant and his coal, the same with all
tradesmen, the same with servants. I never lacked anything for one
hour: _but I continually asked Christ to help me._
Since coming to Union with God, I have had innumerable trials,
some of them tortures, but have been brought safely out of every one.
I afterwards found that each trial was exactly what was needed for
the alteration of some objectionable characteristic in myself. No trial
that came was unnecessary. When its work was accomplished, the
trial disappeared.
* * *
Can it be said that Union with God in this world entails upon us
increased sufferings here? Yes. But these sufferings are not owing to
abnormal occurrences: nothing will happen which is not the
common lot of humanity; merely we are caused to feel that which
we do experience, very acutely; and after Union with God all earthly
consolations must be abandoned: until we abandon these we do not
know how we have depended on them, how they have protected us
from depression, loneliness, boredom, and discontent. Abandon all
these earthly consolations and interests, and at the same time _be
abandoned by God_ (sensible Grace is withdrawn), and immediately
our sufferings become very severe, though our outward circumstances
may appear, and may actually remain, of the very best. If
our house is a fine one, we must live in it completely detached
from its attractions: the same with regard to our friends, our
amusements, our wealth, and all our possessions. It is obvious that
in learning to do this we shall often suffer. The soul has painfully to
learn that without God's Grace there is no virtue, no righteousness,
and no sanctity: she learns by going forward upon Grace--perhaps to
some great height: then Grace is withdrawn, the soul falls back, and
feels to fall lower than she ever was before, and usually she falls
over a trifle. Amazed, unspeakably surprised and humiliated, and
ashamed, the soul learns to know herself--to know herself with God,
to know herself without God. When she is with God, there seems no
height to which she cannot rise: this gives great courage: more and
more she abandons everything distasteful to God in order to unite
herself more securely to Him.
We have no sufferings that are not useful to us. Looking back on my
life, I see how many troubles I suffered: how often my health
suffered (malaria and sun fevers, and lightning and its
consequences): how I was and still am kept in a somewhat fragile
state of health, though quite free of all actual disease. I see in this
frailness, especially during the earlier years of my life, an immense
protection: given full and vigorous health, combined with my selfish
and passionate temperament, and I know very well I should have
fallen in any and all kinds of dangers at all times. I was not to be
trusted with robust health, and even after all the mercies and
blessings God has showered upon me I do not trust myself. I still
remain the sinner, fundamentally and potentially at every step the
sinner. But Love and Grace surround the sinner. Love and Grace
save the sinner from himself: Love and Grace can beautify and make
the sinner shine.
My physical sufferings are not to be compared with the sufferings I
see others endure, and endure cheerfully: this is a great shame and
humiliation to me, because I have not learnt to suffer cheerfully: I
am too easily undone by suffering and by the sight of suffering in
any living thing; but although one may be a coward--that is to say,
one may inwardly shrink from every kind of suffering,--one can be,
and it is necessary to be, quite submissive; and to refrain from the
slightest rebellion or selfishness--this is what God takes note of.
What a difference there is between the selfish and the unselfish
sufferer: how the one makes everyone around him miserable, wears
them out body and soul; and how the other calls out all that is best in
others and strengthens all that is best in himself! It is not so
important whether we are secretly cowards or heroes; what matters
is how we deal with sufferings when they come, what reaction we
permit or encourage on their account in heart and mind and soul.
There is nothing but suffering that can cleanse us, nothing but pain
and misfortune which can so thoroughly convince us of our own
nothingness, and break self-pride: joy will not do it; joy can do
nothing more than refresh us after our sufferings, and in almost all
lives we see how joy is made to alternate with sorrow: it encourages,
it stimulates to further endeavours (this is the reason that God, at a
certain stage of progress, gives extraordinary blisses, ecstasies, and
so on), but it does not disperse our blemishes: the dispersal of
spiritual blemishes is, as we know, the main reason of life in the
flesh; it must be done, and the sooner the better: then we can finish,
once and for all, with flesh existence. Righteous and very virtuous
people may be able to dispense with Divine joys and consolations: it
is doubtful if many sinners can--they require the confidence, the
certainty, the enthusiasm which is naturally kindled by such
experiences. So then we find that the vicissitudes of life, the endless
daily trials, do not go because we find God. But His Grace comes,
and when His Grace is with us wet or shine is all one, love and
beauty gently sparkle everywhere; and then the heart cries out to
him, Every day is like a jewel, every day I see the whole world
decked and garlanded with all the beauty of Thy mind: each tree,
each flower, each bee or bird tremulous with the life and wonder of
Thy creative ingenuity! Each day is a new jewel set upon the
necklace of my thoughts of Thee.
VIII
One of the trials that we have to endure as beginners is a joyless, flat,
ungracious condition; a kind of paralysis of the soul, a dreary torpor.
When we would approach God--pray to Him--He is nowhere to be
found: He has disappeared, and everything to do with finding Him is
become hard work, such hard work that it suddenly seems to us
quite unprofitable: we suddenly remember a number of outside
things which we would far sooner do: we try to pray, but the prayer
goes nowhere-in-particular; it has no enthusiasm, no force behind it:
has prayer then suddenly re-become a duty? This is terrible; what
shall we do--shall we ask God to help us? When we do, we do it in
so halfhearted a manner that our prayer feels to merely float around
our own head like some miserable mist. We feel certain that this
joyless, withered state will endure to the end of life on earth (the
conviction that our unhappy condition is permanent is characteristic
of all severe trials, because if we supposed the condition or
difficulty only momentary it would not produce a sufficient trial,
and consequent effort to overcome it on our part). This trial (though
it may not always be a trial, but an actual blemish of the soul, a
serious lack of unselfish love which must at once be strenuously
corrected) is given for several reasons--we have become, perhaps,
too greedy of _enjoyment_ of prayer: or we have come to take this
joyousness of prayer for granted: or we have come to think we are
uncommonly clever at knowing how to love and to pray; that we
know so well how to do it that we can do it of our own power and
capacity without God's assistance.
Or the trial may be sent not for any of these reasons, but solely in
order to increase the strength and perseverance of our love to God,
and of our Generosity.
This is one trial, and another is that God allows us to become
convinced that He has nothing more to give us, He withdraws His
graciousness from our apprehension; He leaves us as a tiny,
unwanted, meaningless speck, alone in a vast universe. It would be
idle to say that the soul does not suffer from this change; but these
sufferings are just what she requires in order to develop courage,
humility, endurance, love, and generosity. These two trials--the one
when love is all dried up on our part, and the other when we think
love must be all dried up on God's part--are the finest possible
training and exercise for the soul, but they are only such if the soul
_tries ardently to overcome them:_ it is in the effort to overcome
that virtue is learnt, progress made.
There is one most splendid remedy. Is it asking of God? No, it is
giving to God. We give Him thanks and we bless Him, and we tell
Him that we love Him, and we do it with all our heart, mind, soul,
and strength, and this becomes possible even though a moment ago
we were so far from Him, so tepid, seemingly so estranged: it
becomes possible because we remember all the wonderful things
that God has done for us and given us, and made for us, and suffered
for us; and in remembering these it is impossible but that love and
gratitude, like a torch of enthusiasm, will presently flare up in us.
If God never gives us another thing, we will adore Him for His
kindness in the past, we will adore Him for Himself, for what He is.
Desolation and tepidity vanish. Joy returns, the trial is over; but it
will come again perhaps a few hours hence, or to-morrow, or every
day for weeks: the remedy is ever to be reapplied, and the remedy
when thoroughly applied never fails in immediate efficacy; but it
has to be constantly repeated: never let the heart and mind forget
this.
IX
The heart, mind, soul, and will work together and lead together the
reasonable earthly existence; but there is another part of the soul, a
higher part, which has its own intelligence, which leads no earthly
existence, has no direct recognition of _material being;_ thinks no
earth-thoughts, judges by no man-made standards, sins no earth-sins.
Has this part of the soul, then, never sinned? _It feels_ that it has
sinned, though it cannot say how or when, but it _feels_ that this sin
was direct as between itself and God, and is the cause of its
separation from God; and it feels this sin to have been _an
infidelity._ It is with this part of the soul that we sin the
unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be sinned by
mere natural man: (here we touch the mystery of the two orders of
sinning which, to the initiated, are seen both to be covered by the
same commandments). This higher part of the soul mourns and
longs for God with a terrible longing, and can be consoled, satisfied,
by God only; He communicates Himself to this part of the soul. Sins
of heart and mind do not injure it, but retard it: it cannot be
corrupted by material living, because it does not connect itself
directly with earth-living, it "responds" to God alone; but earthly
sins delay it, paralyse its powers, postpone indefinitely its return to
God. Is it this part of the soul which we ordinarily speak of as the
Will? It cannot be, since it is with our Will that we consent to
earth-sins. Have we, then, two Wills? It is reasonable and it conforms with
experience to say that we have two Wills--a Spirit-Will conducting
Spirit-living, and a Reasoning or Mind Will, conducting the affairs
of earth-living: the lower part of the soul is the meeting-place and
the intermediary between these two (often opposing) Wills, it is the
ground upon which they work and have their fruitions.
The Spirit-Will is the Will by which we finally become united to
God. Before regeneration we are unaware in any keen degree of its
existence; but it may exist for us in a vague and confused manner as
an incomprehensible, undefined yearning: we cannot satisfy this
yearning, because we do not know what it requires for its
satisfaction. It is above conscience: conscience has its seat in the
lower soul, there it deals with the affairs of earthly life. This
Spirit-Will is so far above conscience (which can be used, cultivated,
improved, or destroyed, according to our own desire) that it is not
given into the keeping or cognisance of the "natural" man, but
remains unknown, inoperative until reawakened and impregnated
with renewed vigour by direct Act of God in the regenerated man.
This awakening, this reinvigoration, would seem to be synonymous
with the Baptism of the Holy Ghost.
If it is awakened only by Act of God, in what way can we be held
responsible about it? Our responsibility, our part, our opportunity is
to so order the lower or earth-will that God shall see us to be
prepared for the awakening of the Spirit-Will.
This Spirit-Will, once awakened, is never again shut out from direct
communication with God. Even when Grace is withdrawn, this
Will-Spirit can come before God and, no barrier between, know Him
_there_; although He may deny it all consolation and leave it
languishing, it yet retains the consolation of its one supreme
necessity--that of knowing _it has not lost Him._ It waits.
X
Like knows like: it does not "know" its opposite, but is drawn
towards its opposite before and without "knowing" it: here we have
the cause of the condescension of the Good towards the imperfect,
and of the aspiration of the imperfect to the perfect long before it
can "know" the perfect. Without this attraction of like to opposite
the imperfect could not become the perfect (we desire, are drawn to
God, long before we are able to know Him). The imperfect is able to
become the perfect by continually aspiring to it: it gradually
becomes "like." There are no barriers in spirit-living, therefore there
is nothing to prevent the soul becoming perfect, save its own
will-failure. The barrier existing between material- or physical-living and
spirit-living can only be overcome in and by a man's own soul: in
the soul these two forms of living can meet and become known by
the one individual, who can live alternately in the two modes, but it
is necessary that the will and preference shall be continually given
and bent towards spiritual-living, physical-living being accepted
patiently and as a cross. Then flesh ceases to be a barrier to
spiritual-living. This is the work of Christ and of the Holy Ghost. Because
the soul has recaptured the knowledge of this rapturous living we are
not to suppose that it is possible to continually enjoy it here or
introduce its glories into social and worldly living: it is between the
soul and God only; but earth-life can and should by this knowledge
be entirely readjusted.
XI
Are we correct in saying or supposing that this world with all that
we see in it (because perishable) is not real, and that the Invisible is
the only Real? We are using the wrong word: all that we see here is
real after its own manner: it is intentional, it is designed, it is
magnificent, it is the evidence in fixed form of the Supreme
Intelligence; how can we venture to call it unreal, nothing,
negligible? It is a question not of Reality or Unreality, but of greater
and of lesser Activity. In this world we see the Divine Energy
slowed down to its least degree: we see it so much slowed down that
the Divine Ideas can become crystallised into a form and for their
decreed period remain fixed. It is exactly this which the soul
requires in order to recover her lost bearings. She needs the
Beautiful, the Good, and the Bad made sensible to her in _fixed
objects,_ and Time in which to consider them and make her choice
between them. When Spirit-living is experienced, we become aware
that in spirit-life Activity is of such an order as to preclude the mode
of it being in fixed forms and objects: so there is no fixed visible
Beauty, no fixed visible Good or Bad, no fixed _results,_ and the
soul "sees" and "knows" only _that which she herself is like to._ If
she is bad, she cannot become better by the privilege of looking at
that which is good. If she thinks or desires wrong, she remains
wrong: she must think Right in order to produce or "know" Right.
She loses God because she can no longer think godly, and nothing is
fixed by which she can trace Him: it is like to like, and this
instantaneously without pause (or time). Here in this world Like
may behold its Opposite: Bad may behold Good and, because of
being able to behold it, may go over and join its will to Good: it is
able to do this, because the evidence of Good remains fixed whether
the beholder or thinker is good or bad.
What is our quest in this world? It is to refind the lost knowledge of
Celestial-living. Our Goal is God Himself. Our salvation does not
depend upon our finding Celestial-living, but our finding this living
depends upon whether we have found the way of Salvation. This
Celestial-living is here, at our door, but we cannot retouch it without
Act of God. What is essential to obtaining this Act of God? Is it
necessary to belong to this or that Denomination, to perform this or
that ceremony, to stand up, kneel down, or prostrate ourselves a
hundred and one times, visit shrines, handle relics, endlessly repeat
fixed words and sentences? No, these will not do it. Christianity _in
its full meaning,_ a repentant and clean heart and mind--these will
do it. It is a direct affair between the soul and God. It is Thee and me.
This is immense condescension on the part of God. Love alone
makes such a condescension possible.
As in free spirit we think a thought and become it, have a desire
flash to it and are it, it is easy to see how in thinking thoughts that
are not godly, desiring that which is ungodly and imperfect, we pass
far from God by "becoming" imperfection; and, having "become,"
find no satisfaction, satisfaction resting with God only. Having
ceased to think godly, the soul loses God, becomes insensitive, and
falls into darkness, thinks of her own wretchedness and, thinking of
it, is held fast to it. Being miserable, she thinks to Self; thinking of
Self, she is bound to the solitude of Self--blank solitude without
fixed objects to amuse, without fixed Beauty to lead higher, to
restore, to calm. Is all this tantamount to saying that when separated
from God Spirit-life is less desirable than earth-life? It is: for then
we are "dead" to celestial-living, and in Spirit-life all other living is
miserable living. Hence we see the dire necessity of the soul for a
Saviour: the necessity of fixed forms, of time, of flesh (which is a
fixed stay-point for the soul), of the Incarnation of the Saviour _in
flesh_ in order that He may guide the soul amongst these fixed
forms, Himself showing her which to choose and which to cast aside:
we see the necessity of time in order that, though we have an
ungodly thought, we have _time_ to repent and choose a better
before, in a horrible rapidity, we are inevitably _become that which
we had thought._ In this world, this stay-point for the soul, the most
lost is enabled to enjoy and perceive Beauty and Goodness. How
much more easy, then, to return to godly thoughts, to the Good, to
God Himself! But though her Saviour is in this world so near to the
soul, she does not always seek Him. He belongs to the Invisible.
Intoxicated at finding herself amused amongst fixed objects which
she enjoys lazily through fixed mediums of the five senses, she
devotes herself to these objects, surrounds herself with them, forgets
everything else. "It is harder for the rich man to enter the kingdom
of heaven." But she must abandon object-worship: this is not to say
she is to deny the existence of objects, calling them unreal; she must
despise no created object, for each is there to form for her an
object-lesson. She has two choices: she can see the objects, remain
satisfied with them, and seek no further. Or, she can see the objects,
admire them, but seek beyond them for their Instigator and Creator. Now
she is on the track of God. All is well.
But all this is not that Adam may recover his perfection, for when,
and for how long, was Adam "Perfect"? We behold him sinning at
the very first opportunity. In the Fall of Adam we see merely the
continuation in the stay-point of time and of flesh, of the history of
the fallen soul--sinning the same old sin, Self-will.
The way of return to God is the same way by which we came out
from Him--reversed. We came away by means of greeds and
curiosities imagined by Self-will. The return is by casting away
these greeds, casting away all prides, all selfishness; and what
self-loving soul is there that could or would, left alone to herself,
conceive of following such a way of cruel necessities, of such hard
endurance without an Example before her? For the way is a hard
way, a toiling way, at times an awful way, and as we pursue it the
burden grows heavier, the pain sharper: then it grows lighter as the
soul becomes renewed; and the pain is no longer the pain of
loneliness, of sin and sorrow, but becomes the pain of Love, waiting
in certainty for an ultimate Reunion: it becomes pain which is being
forgotten in the returning happiness of God.
But first must come the abandonment of Self-will, bit by bit, to the
death. So we see upon the Cross Christ stripped of everything, and
at the last stripped even of Union with the Father: consenting to bear
the pains of even Spiritual Death: "My God, my God, why hast
Thou forsaken Me?" If there could be any greater depth of pain, He
would have shared that also with the wandering soul. So we are
indeed one with Him in everything: and He with us.
In Spirit-life we meet the Ideas of God uncrystallised into any form.
They penetrate the soul--she flashes to them, she becomes them, she
reaches unimaginable heights of bliss by "becoming." This form of
joy is incomprehensible until experienced: it is stupendous living, if
it may be so expressed it is happiness at lightning velocity; but it is a
lightning happiness which must flash to God. When it ceases to do
this in a full manner, it ceases to be full happiness. When it becomes
further perverted, diverted, and, finally, inverted, it ceases to be any
happiness whatever. It is independent of surroundings: what it
depends on is a perfect reciprocity with its own Source. That the
laws which govern this Divine living will not be altered to suit
wandering souls is not to be wondered at; but a new system may be
called into being, and we may be able to perceive it in this world,
evolved from first to last with its substance, forms, creatures, flesh,
and time, in order to assist such wanderers. God _spends Himself_
for every wandering soul.
XII
Directly this world ceases to afford us pleasure, we wonder why we
were born. The soul longs for happiness; feels certain she was
created for it. So she is. Looking at the masses of drab, ugly, and
unsuccessful lives around us, we may well ask what purpose and
what progress is there in the lives of all these hopeless-looking
people. But there is not one life that does not have brought before it,
and into it, the opportunity of, and the invitation to, self-sacrifice,
and in a greater or lesser degree this is accepted and responded to by
all. There is far more soul-progress made by these grey-looking lives
than would appear on the surface: they accept self-sacrifice--they
accept Duty--all is well. Very much progress may not be made
during the one earth-period of life, but some is made: we drifted
away slowly from God; our return is slow.
XIII
Love is not the mere pleasant sentiment of the heart we are apt to
consider it: it is _the animating principle of the soul,_ it is the reason
and cause of her existence: it is a God-Force. When a soul does not
love God she has ceased to respond to this Force; she is no longer a
"sensitive" or _living_ soul: when she becomes insensitive, she has
become what flesh is when it is "callous."
This insensitiveness is the one great predominating disease of the
soul: it is the cause of the darkness in which the soul finds herself in
this world: it is this which causes our unawareness of God and of
Celestial-living. How can we commence to remedy this disastrous
state? We can act nobly, we can be generous, doing what we do as
though it were for love, although it is merely Duty which animates
us. This will be more or less joyless, because love alone can make
acts joyful; but though it may be joyless it will advance the soul
immensely: it will advance her to the highest degrees required by
God in order that He shall Retouch her. When He Retouches her she
becomes reanimated, she once again commences to live for and
because of love: she becomes "sensitive" to God. This Retouching
may occur only after the soul is free of the body--but the body is the
house in which our examination must be passed, in which we must
prepare and qualify for this Retouching. Hence the importance of
continuing to make every effort _in this life._ The soul which takes
Christ into herself, loves Him, obeys Him, tries to copy Him,
qualifies fully for this Retouching.
XIV
In early youth life may be, and often is, a joyous adventure: little by
little we grow aghast at the amount of suffering which life really
stands for--our own sufferings and those of others, of which, owing
to our own pains, we gradually take more and more note. Why all
this suffering? It appals, it frightens, it makes upon many hearts and
minds a sinister impression: how is this suffering of innocents to be
reconciled with the Benign Will of a God Who is Perfect Love? Let
us cease thinking that indiscriminate suffering to creatures is the
Will of God. What is it, then? It is the inevitable--the long
drawn-out sequence to the soul's departure from God--the Source of
Happiness.
To inhabit flesh is no paradise, but it is a means of regaining heaven.
There is no misfortune, suffering, sorrow, disappointment, or pain,
which is not consequent upon this departure of the soul from God.
Are there here any truly "innocent" persons? To be here at all points
to a fault of the soul, to infidelity to God--the "Original sin" in
which we are born.
The beginning of Salvation is to think. Nothing causes us to think so
much as sorrow, suffering, and pain; and they melt the heart also,
and they humble pride. The man who has never suffered, and never
loved, is more to be pitied than the paralytic: his chance of Life is
remote.
How can we reasonably expect that the road back to our long-since
forsaken God is to be smooth, pleasant, velvet-covered. What
divides us from God? Is it happiness, beauty, and light?
No--self-indulgence, rocks of evil, ugly greeds, places of sin and
selfishness. Can we climb back through all this, most of it in
darkness, without tears, without pain, without every kind of anguish?
Over this part of the road is no peace; but continue, and, little by
little, peace comes.
* * *
We say that we must find Christ; but where, and how, shall we find
this Mighty Lord, Who comes out from the Father to meet the
Prodigal? Must we study in ecclesiastical colleges, travel to distant
lands, visit holy places, kneel on celebrated sacred ground, kiss
stones, attend ceremonies, look at bones?
No! Stand still! Just where we are is the place where we can meet
Him. Just where we stand to-day can be as sacred, as blessed, as the
Holy Land. Some little wood sprinkled with flowers, our own quiet
room, an unknown, nameless hillside--these can be as holy as Mount
Carmel, because He meets us there.
* * *
In all these experiences of the soul which has refound God, what is
it that truly rejoices her? Is it the learning and knowledge that the
pursuit of Truth may bring her to? She values Truth and knowledge
because they lift her towards Him Whom she seeks and loves. Does
the soul rejoice in ecstasies because they are ecstasies? No: what she
values is the recaptured knowledge and certainty of heavenly
living--in however small or brief a degree she is able to attain it in
flesh: and because in the experience of ecstasy _she knows Him to Whom
she belongs._
All other affairs become nothing whatever. Life on earth is now
entirely a means of relearning how to please Him Whom she has
found. Her concern is that she may quickly so prepare herself that
she may behold Him for ever.
It may well be asked of a soul which claims to have found God,
How does she know that she has encountered Him?
We have a Critical Faculty. It is above Reason, because it sifts and
judges the findings of Reason, throwing out or retaining what
Reason has deduced. This is a Higher-Soul faculty: it concerns itself
solely with knowing Perfection. Reason is not occupied with
knowing Perfection, but in analysing and digesting all alike that is
brought to it.
It is to the Critical Faculty that art, poetry, and music appeal, and
make their thought-suggestions. We do not enjoy music because of
the noise, but because of the thoughts suggested by it--we float upon
these emotion-thoughts (we may float low, we may float high, and
do not know to where; but it is somewhere where we cannot get
without the music), so we say we love the music; but it is the
emotion-thoughts we love. The sound and the thoughts suggested by
it appeal to the Critical Faculty of the Soul, and, if it is perfect
enough to be accepted by this faculty, we may pass, for the time
being, into soul-living, but only very delicately, tentatively, and
nothing to be compared to the soul-living, produced by the Touch of
God. When God communicates Himself to the soul, she lives in a
manner never previously conceived of, reaching an experience of
living in which every perfection is present to her as Being there in
such unlimited abundance that the soul is overwhelmed by it and
must fall back to less, because of insupportable excess of Perfections.
This perfection of living is given, and is withdrawn, outside of her
own will. Which is the more sane and reasonable--for the soul to
think, I have invented and originated a new and _perfectly
satisfying_ form of living; or for the soul to conclude that she has
been admitted to the re-encounter of perfect- or Celestial-living? In
this living are happenings which cannot be communicated, or even
indicated to others, because they reach beyond words, beyond all or
any other experience, beyond any possible previous imagination or
expression of mind, beyond all particularisation; it is these occasions
of experience which the Critical Faculty regards as being encounters
with the Supreme Spirit, because they are complete; nothing is
wanting; they afford life at its perfection point--a stupendous
Felicity, and that _Repose_ in bliss for which all souls secretly long.
It is the meeting of the Wisher with the Wished, of Desire with the
Desired: and yet, being that which it is--unthinkable Fulfilment--it is
above all, or any, Wishes, and beyond Desire; it can be known, but
not named.
By these experiences the knowledge of the soul becomes
enlightened two ways: she knows what bliss is; she knows the full
calamity of life away from God--in flesh, in this world: not that flesh
is not a wonderful Idea, not that the world is not greatly to be
admired for its beauties, but the reawakened spirit desires
spirit-living, cannot be pleased with earth-living, cannot be satisfied
with less than God Himself. So, then, the logical consequence is that this
world becomes a place we desire to take leave of as soon as may be.
Life here becomes a punishment: not that Perfect Love desires to
punish, but that the soul now knows that any form of life in which
she is restricted from continual access to Him is a disaster, a
profound grief.
XV
If the soul looks to God to comfort her, asks for His help, and gets
it--and since communication with God is dependent upon some
degree of like to like,--it follows that the soul must maintain a
readiness to "give" to fellow-souls: to fail in this is to fail in any sort
of resemblance to God. Hence we see how carefully Christ enjoined
upon us to "Give to them that ask": and in no niggardly way either,
but wholeheartedly, for "God loveth the cheerful giver."
If we say that we apprehend God by that which is not Mind, what
reason have we for saying that it is not Reason which receives Him?
Because for this living which God's touch causes us to share with
Himself we find that Space, Infinity, and Eternity are required and
Reason stands, and remains, uncomprehending and dumbfounded
before all three. It is Spirit, the flash-point of the soul, which
receives and transmits and which lives this living. As we have an
heredity of flesh so we have also an heredity of Spirit which of its
own nature comprehends the ways of God and the mode of God's
living. In High Contemplation we find that if Reason attempts
activity, nothing is consummated: she must submerge herself and
wait: soon Reason discovers the wherefore of this--her activity is not
the activity of That Other. Only by that which is like in activity can
That Other be received: this "like" is not herself: finally she comes
to know this "like" as a higher part of the soul--Spirit. When Spirit
has received and given it to the soul, then it is afterwards the part of
Reason to attack from every side that which has been received, to
digest it, absorb it, and share it, in fact though not in act. According
to the health and strength of Reason so we shall successfully deal
with and use that with which the Spirit presents us. By comparison
with the magnificent Spirit-Activity or Spirit-Intelligence the
Reason is limited and frail as a new-born babe: this is no humiliation
to Reason, since she should not be expected to accomplish that
which is not her part.
Why do not all men apprehend God? It is very questionable if all
men desire to do so, because in the recesses of each man's soul lies
the consciousness that there will be some great price to pay.
But beyond this there arises the question, Is it desirable, price or no
price, that all souls should come while still in flesh to immediate
knowledge of, and contact with, God; and after long and close
thinking the experienced soul will answer No, and Yes. No, in so far
as the apprehension of the Godhead is concerned; Yes, and most
vitally Yes, for Christians, in so far as Communion and Contact with
Christ is concerned. Why this distinction? Because the apprehension
of the Godhead is beyond the requirements of salvation and
redemption, and the world and flesh were created for those purposes.
Though there is no limit to the heights to which the soul may aspire,
and all souls are invited eventually to behold the Face of God, if so
be they shall be able to prepare themselves to endure Him, there are
to a soul still in flesh the most terrible dangers in knowing the
Fullness of God even so far as His Fullness may be Known to Flesh:
never perhaps in all her history is the soul in such danger as she is
after coming (in flesh) to the apprehension of the Godhead: and this
danger may extend in an acute degree over a period of many years
and can never be said to cease altogether. The Soul Knows and feels,
when in its acute stage, this horrible danger without comprehending
its exact cause and nature, but it has about it the feeling that
a man might have standing balanced on a narrow pinnacle.
Unapproachable, untouchable only so long as he remains upon the
summit, the eyes of a thousand enemies watch for his smallest
descent: they watch day and night. What alone can enable the Soul
to maintain such a position? Hourly, often momently, Communion
with Jesus Christ. What makes such perseverance likely or even
possible on the soul's part? Only love can make it so.
If we say Communion with Christ is for the Christian vital to a full
redemption, and therefore the Apprehension of Him is essential, to
what degree should we experience this Apprehension of Him? The
degree at which, perceiving in Him and His ways our Ideal, we
become willing to modify and change _our manner of thinking and
doing_ in order to meet the requirements of this Ideal. Having gone
so far, the soul is likely to become enamoured of Him Personally:
then all is indeed well for her.
So then we find that we can apprehend God by an ever-ascending
scale of degrees. We can apprehend Him with the Reason and the
heart at all hours of the day. We can seek and approach Him with
the holy white passion of the Mind. Yet this is not the Apprehension
of Him which alone can be termed Contact, and which alone
satisfies the soul or gives us the full feeling that we Know God. We
cannot "Know" God as fully as He can be known by flesh without
we enter ecstasy; but it is not ecstasy which produces the meeting
with God, but the meeting with God which produces the ecstasy.
Though we are able to enjoy a continual apprehension of Him with
heart and Reason, no man could endure an unremitting ecstasy.
Can ecstasy be prepared for? Yes, if we have courage to aspire to it,
it can be prepared for by a contemplation of Him in which, to
commence with, the Will, Mind, and heart, in great activity of love,
send forth all their powers towards God: then for love's sake being
glad and willing to become nothing, and becoming, as it were, dead
to themselves and all interests and desires usual to them, by Act of
God their normal living is then taken over into a greater living. Then
He comes.
And when He comes the Reason does not receive Him, but that
certain small part, little more than a point in the soul receives Him.
Apart from the joy of it, what is the true value of ecstasy to him to
whom it is granted? It raises him above Faith into Certitude. The
peace and strength given by Certitude are such that Joy is neither
here nor there, the soul can wait for it, because, no matter what may
afterwards happen to such a one, he remembers, and remains once
and for all aware, that God Is, _and that He can be Known_: he
learns also a new knowledge, but cares nothing for this because it is
knowledge or because it is power, but because it brings him nearer
to his God.
Having once learnt the knowledge that comes by ecstasy alone, truth
to tell, the soul would be content to receive no further ecstasy in
flesh; but, intoxicated with love and worship, she best enjoys herself
doing all the giving, for when He comes and gives He bursts down
all her doors and, under the awful stress of Him, the soul hardly
knows how to endure either Himself or herself.
Life in this world is a life for spiritual weaklings. Our eternal Self is
an Intelligence, a Desire, and a Will, and the life we live with it is no
idle, torpid, confined living such as we have here, but is a living _in
Liberty,_ without limit, restriction, fatigue, or satiety; in it word
thoughts and thinking are superseded; by comparison to it even the
highest thought-achievements of men, their noblest aspirations,
appear like the sand-castles of children. Ravished at such further
revelations of the Genius of God, the soul at last knows satisfaction.
It requires perfection in order to be permanently operative, because
only in perfection is Freedom found, and because for the living of it
nothing can remain but such Essentials of the soul as _cannot be
dispersed._ It is a measureless Generosity and an ecstasy of
Receiving and Giving. To say that purity and perfection are required
for this living is no mere arbitrary dictum, but a scientific fact: the
impure, imperfect soul finds herself unable in perfect liberty and
freedom _to expand to interaction_ with the Divine Activity. When
the process of Return is sufficiently completed and, being still in
flesh, we enter for a brief time this living, Reason, Pain and Evil,
Yesterday and To-morrow disappear. Reason is gathered up into,
and superseded by, the spiritual and wordless Intelligence: Pain and
Evil, their part and work accomplished, are dispersed and banished
into the mists of darkness.
So the soul may learn even from this world something of the
mystery of the Depths of God. She may enter into the happiness of
Union with the Three in One: the One Whom in a state of glory yet
to come she may Behold. But beyond This of Him which He will
allow her to Behold, beyond This of Him in which she may repose
in bliss, and beyond this Repose which He wills her to know of Him,
He shows her that yet more of Him Is which He will share--heights
of Felicity beyond all measure, holding the soul till she must pray
Him to release her, or she will perish--reeling depths of rapture in a
mystery of light; bliss beyond bliss for that lover who shall
venture--all Eternity unfolding in fulfilment.
And yet remains That of Him which wills no reciprocity, but shares
Himself with Himself. So peace Is. And so, even in not giving, He
yet does give that which is most precious, for without He Himself in
His forever hidden depths were Peace, His creatures could neither
know nor have peace.
Looking into herself, what does the soul perceive? Apart from sins
and virtues she perceives two things--caprice and free-will. Neither
are of her own creation, but are essentials of her being. It may be
that in caprice and free-will she may find an answer to those two
questions which stir her to her depths: What is she that God should
so love her? and how comes she to be away from Him? Clothed in
the body of either man or woman, the soul is predominantly
feminine--the Feminine Principle beloved of, and returning to, the
Eternal Masculine of God. Caprice is feminine; Caprice and
Mystery are two enchanting sisters, and in Woman we see them as
being irresistible to Man. Angels, though they are a glory of God's
heaven, cannot alone satisfy all the needs of their Creator: they have
neither sex nor caprice, nor the mystery which joins hands with it.
So He creates the soul, and He gives her an heredity of Himself in
the flash-point of the soul, and He gives her sex and caprice and
free-will to deny herself to Him if she choose; and in her caprice she
goes out and away from Him, and when she would return she cannot,
because in infidelity she has dropped from perfection. Disillusioned
by her unfaithful wanderings and horribly pained, the soul longs for
Him, and He longs for her. He Himself must make her the way of
return, which is the way of redemption, and at a terrible cost to
Himself He shows her His Righteousness and the mode of her
Return in the Face and the Ways of Jesus Christ; and in the
Crucifixion He shows her the measure of His love, and in the Cross
the necessary abandonment of all self-will--total surrender. And all
this suffering to Himself He bears in order to make good the wilful
sinning and the misery of the wayward soul. So He brings home the
soul, not by force but by love--that love by which He is at once the
Life of everything and everything is the life of Him.
Absence from God is Pain, and everlastingly will be Pain in varying
degrees. Are there souls who have never left Him? Undoubtedly, but
they know nothing of this world. Are we perhaps distressed at this
multiplicity of worlds and souls? We need not be, for they are a
necessity both of God and of ourselves; for God to Be Himself He
must give Himself, and who can receive Him? Not even the greatest
of all the Angels can alone bear to endure Him? Only into a vast
multiplicity of individuals can God pour and expend Himself to the
fullness of His desire, the One to the many. Each individually
receives from Him, and each individually and collectively--the many
to the One--returns Him those burning favours which are in
Celestial-living.
Is it all joy to find God? How can it be? Can faults and sins be
eradicated without pain? Life here for the lover of God is one long
eradication of offences. How can even the daily requirements of
flesh be fulfilled without pain? How without profound humiliation
and patience can we descend from Contemplation to duties in the
household? How without pain consider with that same mind which
has so recently been rapt in God--the various merits of breads,
pastries, and portions of dead animals, in order that flesh shall eat
and live! What a fall is this!--a fall that must be taken daily and
patiently. Is it all joy to love God? How can it be? For Love carries
in itself a terrible wound of longing which can never be healed till
we come before Him in possession Face to Face.
And many times a day in an unpremeditated natural anguish Love
remembers the sufferings of that meek and holy Saviour; how can it
be a joy to the soul that passionately loves Him to stand before a
tortured Lord, tortured for her? There never was a pain as hard and
sharp as this. There are no tears like the tears we shed to Christ.
XVI
We say of God that He is Love and Light, Wisdom and Truth. He is
also a Gracious Consenting. So we see the Divine Light Consenting
to darkness that it may return to Light, and Divine Love Consenting
to infidelity that it may return to Perfect Love.
But this Gracious Consenting is not because of or since Adam, but
Adam "is" because of this Consenting.
In the flesh of Adam the fallen soul is brought to a stay-point. Any
that have experienced spirit-living even for one hour know that in
immortal living is no stay-point but infinity of movement, in which
movement the wandering soul becomes lost and finally insensitive.
By means of the flesh the soul is brought to that stay-point where
she more easily receives and understands the impregnation of
Consenting Light, which is the Divine Begetting; and she receives
the drawing power of Consenting Love: she is directly operated
upon by the Divine Pity Who Himself came to show her the Way of
Return: first, by the negation or sacrifice of flesh lusts; secondly, by
the sacrifice of spiritual lusts (by which the soul originally fell);
until finally, by death to all lusts and infidelities she is reunited to
the blisses of Immortal Life. This is the kindly purpose of our life in
this world. Christ being Eternal Light and Love and Life, we also
are eternal _who contain Christ._
So, then, we consent to abandon all lusts of the flesh whilst also
consenting to endure any consequences of these lusts in ourselves
and others, not in unwillingness to endure, which is resistance, but
in submission. From consenting to abandon the delights of the flesh
we advance to consenting to the withdrawal of all spiritual delights
from us: enduring instead spiritual difficulties, standing firm in the
strength of Christ whilst the assaults of self-will and infidelity batter
the soul.
We consent to abandon self-absorption in the delights of God, and,
returning to the world, endeavour to perform all acts of life in the
world in a manner consonant with perfection; but this is impossible:
this effort is insupportable without Grace. We cannot do it alone.
We learn to know it and to know that we are never alone. Even if we
fall into the deepest sin, we are not abandoned by the Divine
Graciousness: by consenting to abandon this wickedness we are
immediately reunited with the Divine Consenting, and so onwards
and upwards in an ever-ascending improvement to perfection: and
by consenting the soul daily sinks into the balm of Christ and loses
her burden.
We see the Perfection of this divine consenting and abandonment of
Self-Will in the final picture of the Cross. We see unmurmuring
consent to the death of flesh, consent to the attacks of evil, consent
to injustice, consent to infidelity (and straightway they all forsook
Him and fled), and, finally, consent to the death of Divine Union:
this not without groanings, as being the one supreme and only
insupportable Agony.
XVII
How is it that Perfect Love can consent to the wandering of the soul
with its consequent sorrow and sin? Divine Light, being also Perfect
Freedom, consents to the wandering of the soul; but Divine Love,
being also Reciprocity, may not consent to such wandering as shall
for ever preclude Reciprocity. The wandering soul must be, will be,
Redeemed.
* * *
If Divine Light, being also Perfect Freedom, consents to the
wandering of the soul, but Divine Love, being also Reciprocity, may
not consent to a perpetual wandering, how set limits in a life in
which perfect freedom must continue? A limit can be fixed by Evil,
Evil the outermost circle from God, the shore on which, continually
breaking and being broken, the soul turns herself in longing to a
long-forgotten Lord. Evil is the hedge about the vineyard of the
Parable. The soul is free to touch it, free to pass through it if she will,
but touching it she knows Pain. Pain causes the soul to pause and
consider: now is her opportunity; now she is likely to turn about and
seek the Good.
Then the purpose of Evil is fulfilled; then Evil becomes the
handmaid of Good; then we can feel and say with sincerity, Evil has
smitten me friendly, for it has caused me to turn about and seek
Good. Good, once found, is found to be stronger than Evil. In a few
years Good has so drawn us that Evil has become negligible; it lies
forgotten on a now distant misty shore. The soul is Homeward
bound.
XVIII
"If the wicked turn from his sins that he hath committed and keep
my statutes . . . all his transgressions that he hath committed, they
shall not be mentioned unto him."--Ezekiel xviii. 21, 22.
XIX
Who is so blessed as the Redeemed Sinner? Who can taste the
sweetness of God as can the repentant sinner? Who can know His
graciousness, His infinity of tenderness and courtesy, as can the
sinner? Who knows the heights and depths and lengths and breadths
of God's forgiving love as does the sinner? Who can share with God
hereafter such close experiences as will the sinner?
Can Angels share the memories of His human days with Christ?
And who but the sorely tempted sinner can be bonded to Him by the
mutual knowledge of those bitter, burning, desert days? Not the
Righteous, nor even Angels can know quite the full beauty of all the
bonds that bind the sinner to his Saviour. O marvellous love of God!
O blessed soul, O blessed Adam, blessed even in thy sins!
He desired lovers and had none: Created Angels, and, desiring to
prove them as lovers, He made Him a Lure.
A third of them turned to the Lure and fell to It. They serve the Lure
and take their bread from It, and the offspring of the serving is Evil.
Desiring more lovers, He fashioned souls; yet, when He proved
them, they also fell to the Lure.
Being lesser than Angels, they served not the Lure, but the offspring
of it--Evil--and became subject to Evil. They were made for Love,
and in Evil found no Love, and it was an anguish and it tormented
them.
And He put them in flesh, that He might limit their suffering and
show them His Light again; covered them about with Limits like a
merciful Cloak; hedged them in with Evil as a boundary, so they
should have no will to fall away further from Him than Evil because
of the pain of it.
But in flesh they continued to serve Evil, and the offspring of the
serving was Sin: and they were miserable in their service, because of
the pain of it; yet no soul could break the bondage of service,
because no soul could be found that, being subject, did not serve,
and in serving lose freedom by its own offspring.
Then He sent His Spirit to walk with them in flesh, and being
proven as a Lover, was not found wanting, and being subject to Evil
did not serve, and remaining Sinless had no offspring to destroy His
freedom, and He broke the bondage and showed them a light.
He sent, because He repented Him of the Proving and of the Evil
that came of it, and His fallen lovers repented and repent of their fall.
His travail and their travail--the travail of severed Love towards
Reunion--is the anguish of the Ages: but the anguish will have an
end, because Love is Omnipotence.
------
[Transcriber's notes: The name of the author, Lilian Staveley, is not
mentioned on the title page of this text, but I have added it here.
I have also made the following editorial changes:
"I am of no value value whatever" to "I am of no value whatever"
"called it it by the same name as I" to "called it by the same name as I"
"God shall see us to to be prepared" to "God shall see us to be prepared"
"the full beauty of all the the bonds" to "the full beauty of all the
bonds"]
"(though entirely without effort on her part) is immensely increased)" to
"(though entirely without effort on her part) is immensely increased"]
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