» 1. The Cross        » 2. The Assumption       » 3. Separation     » 4. Judge Not        NEW » 5. The Will–Love

The Cross

    To know all that one is and does as completely superfluous and yet continue being and doing with utmost devotion -- this is humility.

   “Unless devotion is given to the thing which must prove false in the end, the thing which is true in the end cannot enter.” (Charles Williams)

    “The ecstasy which is wine entered into the lucidity which is water....” (Charles Williams of the Marriage at Cana) 

Justice and Mercy

    " The sky rains down justice and the earth opens and brings forth a Savior”  -Advent Ember Wednesday Liturgy

    What is the “Justice” of God? Certainly not the human notion of reward and punishment here below. It is the justice of the natural order, the strict impartiality of the fact, the rain which falls on good and bad alike; while the Mercy of God is His Grace, descending into and penetrating the natural order, entering the hearts of His chosen, of those who choose.

The mother of God is the earth of humanity, opening herself to that rain from above, receiving and accepting Justice in all its terrible impartiality; and as she does so she fully exposes her heart to the agony of what is. She receives in the same moment the plenitude of Grace and Joy, the ultimate Mercy, that which is to be the “fruit of her womb.”

Ordinary and  Extraordinary

    To do the ordinary thing in an ordinary way is easy. To do the extraordinary thing in an extraordinary way is easy -- both these kinds of activity are very common indeed. But to do the ordinary thing in an extraordin­ary way and the extraordinary thing in an ordinary way is quite staggeringly difficult and very rare indeed.  It is the way of the saints.

The Cross

    Only one, the one mystic, among the apostles was actually present in the flesh at the crucifixion; only he and the women and the sinners. Those who were to spread the Gospel, labour in the (outer) vineyard and themselves suffer martyrdom, were not so present.

    Does it mean that the contemplative life can lead a man to such close union with the Cross, with the world’s agony, that he must be in some measure withdrawn from outer activity in order to be able to bear it? There is no need for him to be put to death by the world for he is already dead to all things. Christ himself, it should be remembered, was emphatically not simply the greatest of all martyrs.  His death was of another order altogether. Many martyrs died singing and praising God.  He died in the uttermost dereliction. His death was not a sacrifice, it was THE sacrifice — “full, perfect and sufficient.”  So the death through which a Saint John must pass is a sharing The death, not a personal martyrdom. (I think it is true to say that almost none of the greatest mystics who clearly attained to the life of ‘union’ here below were martyrs — St. John of the Cross, Dionysius, Ruysbroek, St. Teresa, Eckhart). St. Teresa says their sufferings interiorly are something hardly to be conceived of by those on the active way. St. Paul is the exception, perhaps.

The women, too, were present. There is a sense in which all women (real women) by nature enter into this death. They know it by their motherhood, physically, instinctively, emotion­ally and sometimes spiritually. The three Marys are all equally present and know the fact ac­cording to their several states of love, though only by the very few is it experienced in a love which has deepened to virginity in the inner meaning of the word. Present also is Salome, the mother of John whose love then gives up her son as she hears him taken from her and given to a greater mother. Finally also the “women of Jerusalem” are there, weeping for the wrong reason, but none the less there and gazing on the fact.

Thirdly, the sinners are present -- those who know not what they do. The thieves on their crosses, suffering with Him in another mode, are offered by Love a supreme movement of choice between recognition and rejection, The sold­iers, blind, doing what seems right to them, are therefore exposed to the possibility of awakening, the certainty of forgiveness -- “Surely this was the Son of God.”

    Those who were not present were of two kinds.   The disciples who had accepted Him were not yet conscious enough (except John) for vision; the Pharisees, who had rejected Him, were no longer blind enough for forgiveness. Each group was in a half—way state of consciousness. The former would move nearer to --  the latter would move further from the great turning point of the life of the soul, which is always and everywhere the Cross.

“The still point of

the turning world —

neither from nor towards. . .”-  T. S. Eliot

The  Assumption

    Only in Christianity (and in Zen, real Zen, not Western misconception of it) is matter given its whole validity, and the Christian definition of this is the doctrine of the Assumption.

    It is often held against Christianity that the woman is given a status lower than that of the Trinity. Mary, it is said, should be a Goddess fully equal to the other Three, and the primitives knew better with their moon goddesses, etc.

This criticism is based on a misconception. The doctrine of the Assumption makes it clear that humanity redeemed exists eternally in union with God. But woman does not create — she receives and brings forth — as in time, so in eternity.

    The symbol of Mary bodily assumed, but precisely not a Goddess is surely a deeper thing than any other. She is Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, but she is not God. She remains completely human. Somehow it is a greater image than that of any mere Goddess.

    The primitive had to deify the feminine principle, because he did not know humanity redeemed, matter taken up into Heaven but re­maining forever itself — “This is my Body” — but it is still a fragment of bread. The Trinity of the Godhead does not simply enter into the material elements, join itself to the bread and wine, as God did not simply operate through man in Christ. It actually becomes the bread and wine — Christ actually was God and Man in one Person. Earth and Heaven, time and eternity, are not two but one reality. So potentially with every detail of life on earth, once it is offered in its wholeness to the Divine. The life of the Mother of God was the perfect offering, so complete that God was born of her flesh. “Figlia del tuo Figlio.” But to say that she was actually God is immediately to be landed in a kind of pantheism. Every mystic has said in effect that in the state of union man becomes God by participation. But as long as the Reality is expressed by image or concept at all it remains false to say that he is the same essentially as God, i.e. uncreated. — Christ alone is begotten, His Mother, she who gives Him birth, is created and taken up again into her Creator through union with this her Son. “Figlia del tuo Figlio.”

    Jung has accused Christianity of ignoring the “fourth”, and it is true that this knowledge, implicit in the Christian Revelation from the beginning, has only now in this age been allowed officially as Dogma — that is to say recognized as absolute Truth. The ignorant imagine a new Dogma to be something thought up by the Pope and his advisers and imposed on the faithful. — On the contrary, as Jung has pointed out, it is something made explicit which before has been implicit, lying in the unconscious and consciously known by a few through the ages, but now rising with great power to the surface and demanding definition. The Pope, “moved by the Holy Spirits” (as Jung again says) merely responds.

Separation    

    It is for man to journey to the extreme of separation from God before he can “return.”   Or rather the extreme of separation is surely found suddenly to be the Return.  “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”   Christ on the cross, God separated from Himself — this is the uttermost agony without which no Resurrection — and so at all other levels.  Without Ascension, the going up of the human, felt immanence of God into the transcendent impersonality of the Godhead, (could this be compared to the dark night of the Spirit?) — no Pentecost or descent of the Holy Spirit, which is both immanent and transcendent (union of God and the soul in this life).

    Without total detachment from friends and people, no “unity of the Spirit in the bond of love.”   Without the “going out of one^’s mind,” no birth of the divine knowing.

The Ten Lepers

    The healing of the ten lepers was their chance to turn the degradation of the separa­tion of the unclean from society into the willed detachment of the clean in heart. Only one of the ten made this choice, when he returned to give thanks.  The other nine (and most of us after our lesser cleansings, are with them) simply say “How nice to be clean!  Now I can go and connect up again with society, indulge my particular attachments from which I was sep­arated by my uncleanness or my sin.” And the last state is worse than the first. The defilement may become progressively more subtle — from leprosy through ingratitude to decay of the will.

Separations of the Bible

    The lesson for the “Solemnity of St Joseph” -- how lovely a thing!  “The blessings of Heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breast and of the womb — The blessings of thy father have prevailed — unto the utmost bounds of the everlasting hills, they shall be upon the head of Joseph and on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren.”

    Joseph separate from his brethren, David from Saul, from Jonathan, from his son. Rebecca from Jacob, Ruth from her home, Moses from his mother, Elijah from all men, Elisha from Elijah. . . . . . . . . New Testament — The Apostles from their worlds, Mary Magdalene from her lovers, Paul from the Jews.

    At the root of all — the initial separation of Adam from God — to be redeemed at a moment in time, and throughout all eternity, by the supremely glorious separations of the Incarna­tion — the Mother from her Son, the Son from His Mother, the Son from his Father, God from God.

* * * * *

     Julian of Norwich: “When Adam fell God’s son fell; because of the rightful one-ing which had been made in Heaven, God’s son might not be dis-parted from Adam (for by Adam I understand All—Man).  Adam fell from life to death into the deep of this wretched world; God’s Son fell with Adam into the deep of the Maiden^’s womb, who was the fairest daughter of Adam.   For in all this our good Lord showed His own Son and Adam but one.”

    Fall and Redemption are therefore inevitably a simultaneous happening — as in the Cosmos, so in the individual.  Each falling of the soul, each turning away from God, each separation, car­ries within itself the possibility of return with increase of consciousness, increase of love. So Charles Williams speaks of every possible happening no matter how evil, as a potential “occasion for love.”

      The separations of life are three-fold, as the separations of Christ were three-fold:  Son from Mother, Son from Father, God from God.  In the outer life these are:

1.                  Birth — physical separation from the mother and adolescence; — emotional separation from the mother

2.                  Maturity and intellectual freedom — sep­aration from the father

3.                  Death, the separation of body from soul, tearing apart of the two great realities — God separated from God

    In the interior life it is the same pattern, this time lived in full consciousness. “Flesh knows what spirit knows, but Spirit knows it knows.“ (Charles Williams)

1.                  Purgation — the dark night of the senses with separation from the collective Mother

2.                  Illumination — the dark night of the Spir­it — separation from collective mind and spirit — spiritual poverty

3.                  Mystical death — “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” — separation from every thought, feeling, desire — from everything but the fact, the thing in itself. This is the cross at every moment — the “condition of complete simplicity, costing no less than everything.”  (T. S. Eliot) This is the extreme of separation which is in the same moment union, God and Man whole and entire.

    Out of each and every separation at whatever level of being, from the simplest most unconscious separation of the infant from the womb, to the agonies of the lonely spirit as it tears itself loose from all consolation, from all the cushions of its past, from all the people and things and ideas and feelings to which it has hitherto clung as aids on the path to God — out of each and every separation comes birth, trans­formation, newness of life, until finally the I AM of eternity remains alone.

Judge Not

    The words that follow are not ‘and ye shall be judged virtuous or worthy of reward’. They are a promise that he who does not judge will not be judged at all. ‘Judge not’ - it is something beyond the opposites - no mere exhortation to be just and tolerant of our neighbor but, like most of the words of Christ when listened to with the whole mind and heart and body, something which blasts to pieces all our ex­cellent human categories.

Sure it is that we must know how to “Judge righteous judgment”, to cease from calling evil good and good evil. It is forever im­possible for anyone to pass beyond the oppo­sites of judgment if he has not first ful­filled the law, paid his debt to life, lived his ‘Karma’ - “Not one jot or one tittle shall pass from the law till all be fulfilled.”

A man must be able to look into himself, to recognize what he finds there as well as that which is outside, and to judge it all with the purest objectivity of thought and feeling. Only then may he find himself beyond the Day of Judgment, in the state of nonjudgment here and now in which there is no ‘I want or do not want’, ‘I like or do not like’ but only the Glory of God,

Nevertheless it is false to say that be­cause we fall so far short of objectivity we should not try here and now with all the strength and love that is in us to come to that state of emptiness. For the converse is also true - that no man can attain to purely ob­jective judgment until he has touched that which is beyond, “You could not seek Me if you had not already found Me.” (Pascal). All the Zen stories are directed to awakening precisely this state of nonjudging in those still par­tially blind and bound.

To judge not at all - neither oneself, nor others nor any created thing - not because we are unconscious of difference with the innocence of pure instinct, but because we shall have dared to submit in all things to the operation of grace, to the terrible purity of the Judgment of God, dared to become aware of every detail of the pattern, dark as well as light, to see everywhere and in all circum­stances the undimmed glory. ‘That which containeth all things hath knowledge of the Voice’. This, paradoxically, is ‘Holy indifference’ - this is the life of grace, the gate of the Kingdom, the mind of Christ.

“Judgment is recognition.” (Fr.. McLane)

The Gap

    God cannot give Himself as long as there remains in the soul any need at all for con­solation, any demand whatsoever  for His gifts. (Cloud of Unknowing)

To be completely shut off from God, with­out feeling, without vision, and yet to re­main in a strange sort of dry adoration before That which is unseen, unfelt, unknown — is this what it means to stand in the “gap” as did Moses?

Detachment

    Suffering is the way because without it we would hardly begin to detach from - to be conscious of - the 10,000 things. But it is only possible to suffer consciously, instead of emotionally, in the exact measure that we are willing to detach from our pleasurable feelings also.

“ASK NOTHING — REFUSE NOTHING” - St. Frances de Sales

    It is very simple to offer for the Glory of God the content of every moment exactly as it is, emptied of all demand and of all refusal, whether it be joy, sorrow, pain, fear, ecstasy or boredom, strength or weakness, triumph or shame - very simple and yet so immensely difficult. For in order to come to this abandonment two things are necessary at one and the same time. The whole content of the moment must be accepted and experienced without any vestige of evasion, physical, emotional or mental, and yet the soul must remain in unchanging detach­ment from it. Without the full experience the offering remains unreal, discarnate, an in­sincere image, a ghost. Without the detachment no offering can even be conceived, for there re­mains only identification or repression as the case may be; and the soul is torn and rent by demand and refusal.

The Will – Love

The proper activity of the will is love, and all distortions and weaknesses of the will derive from impurity in the Love which moves it.

Where there is pure love the will is of necessity in union with God, - Or equally, where the will is completely abandoned to the Will of God, there is pure love in action.

Impurity in love is the admixture of a desire for any kind of dividend - physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual.

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE

The common phrase “you asked for it” is used lightly in the sense “you deserved it” - But like so many other misunderstood habits of speech, it has an exact and literal meaning.  We always ask for what we get, or get what we ask for, though we seldom know that we have thus asked, and reject violently in consciousness that for which in the unconscious we are yearning.  Each man at the deepest level of all “asks” always for the will of God, and when it is given him at every moment of his life, he will, unless he has begun to walk in the way of surrender, call it “luck” good or bad, “injustice”, senseless chance or earned reward, instead of which each moment of life,  even sin,  is simply the answer to our asking at one level or another, individually or collectively, and presents us with a forever repeated “occasion” for love, opportunity for consciousness.

What of the suffering of children?  The answer holds good, mystery though it is.  Where there is no individual asking there is collective asking,  for there is only one Adam,  and the suffering for which the heart of creation yearns (since it is the price of redemption)  when it is not borne individually, consciously,  with free consent of the will, must be borne collectively by innocent and guilty alike.  The great archetype of this is the massacre of the Holy Innocents.  The world’s violent rejection of the Holy Birth, of the Saviour for whom it at the same time longed, is paid for by the death of those least guilty of that rejection.

Mankind craves a Saviour, but will not pay the price, accept the agony of consciousness, and so the suffering is diverted onto the unconscious level and the innocent die.  Herod, as individual, refuses the greatest opportunity of his life, sees it as a mere threat to his personal supremacy, rejects love, is thrown instead into a panic of hate.  No matter what is killed in the process, this deadly thing must be stamped out, lest he be forced to face his own nothingness.  And not only Herod. -  There must be few indeed who can look into themselves with open eyes and not see this very horror.  But thanks be to God, we do not succeed.  The innocents suffer but rejoice in Heaven, for the Divine thing is not stamped out - hidden in Egypt, yes, but gloriously to return.

Meanwhile there is the prayer of the Saints - of those who have not refused the price, and who being free and whole, are in union with Him who came freely to His death, in full consciousness on the Cross.  These may choose to suffer still, thus lifting in their degree the collective burden, as He in a mystery carried the whole, and speeding who knows how many on their way to the liberty of the Sons of God.

ASCETICISM

We are often revolted by the extreme bodily penances practised in the Middle Ages, and are apt to look askance at them as the custom of a less enlightened age. But the reason for this is surely obvious.  The Desert Fathers and all their medieval successors lived in an age struggling to emerge from the absolutely unbridled sensuality of paganism and the dark centuries.  The ego therefore was in general identified with the body and the life of the senses and it required an extreme discipline to separate it therefrom.  The Saint must in each age bear the kind of penance which is the crying need of his contemporaries, even if he personally could do without it.  Therefore when we dismiss these extremes as having no relevance to us, we have need to ask ourselves if we are bearing an equal burden of discipline and mortification in the regions where our own age is tied and bound.  For our own identification with the mind and spirit is something much more dangerous than the pagan identification with the body, and the breaking of it demands a constant effort of penance and mortification every bit as searing and terrible as the hairshirt and the daily scourges.

And it may be that in every age the woman’s hairshirt is the mortification of her feeling.  For it is here in the sphere of relationship that a woman is almost always bound by her identifications.  She partakes, of course, of the problem of her time, but basically she changes little.

The seven wounds which pierced the Mother of God were all shattering pangs of consciousness in the matter of her relationship to her Son.  And to the traditional seven may be added the moment of His leaving home, and the moment of His public disavowal of a special personal relationship with her. “Thy Mother is without and asking for Thee” -  “Who is my Mother?”  -  “They who do the Will of God.”

How sharp a sword this in the heart of woman!