* * *
How
humanity is extolled by its own kind! How men are admired, even glorified! I am
amazed, for where is the glory of any man? But rather, how wonderful and
glorious is God! that He should cause to spring from one handful of dust such
possibilities! Wonderful God! And blessed man, that he should have so wonderful
a God!
* * *
Some
men say that man has invented for himself the thought of God, because of the
great need he feels within himself for such a Being.
Yet
look where we will in Nature, do we find a warrant for such a thought? Are
babes inspired with the desire for milk, and is that milk withheld from the
nature of all mothers? No; to the babe is given the desire because the mother
has wherewith to satisfy. So with grown men: for to us is given a deep and
secret desire for the milk of God's love, and to Himself He has reserved the
joy of leading us to it and bestowing it upon us.
* * *
Sometimes
for a short while the soul will suffer from a sickness (I speak now for persons
already very well advanced); she is parched and without sweetness. Her love has
no joy in it. This is not a condition to be accepted or acquiesced in, but must
be overcome at once by a remedy of prayer: prayer addressed to the Father, in
the name of Jesus Christ, a prayer of praise and adoration—"I praise
and bless and love and thank Thee, I praise and bless and love and worship
Thee, I praise and bless and love and glorify Thee"—till the heart is
fired and we return to the intimacy of love. Or the Lord's Prayer, very slow,
and with an intention both outgoing and intaking. So far I have never
known these remedies to fail, and joy floods the soul and sends her swinging up,
up, on to the topmost heights again. It is magnificent.
How
is it that we can pass so, up from the visible into the Invisible, and become
so oned with it, and feel it so powerfully, that the Invisible becomes a
thousand times more real to us than the visible! It is like a different manner
of living altogether. And when anyone so living finds himself even for a short
time unfastened from this way of living and back again to what is known to the
average as normal life, this normal life seems no better to him than some
horrible chaotic and uneven turmoil, and his brain ready to be turned if he had
to remain in it for long. When so unfastened, the whole savour of life is
completely gone, and a smallness of mind and outlook is fallen back into from
which the soul recoils in horror and struggles quickly to free herself.
Is
this the remnant of the unruly creature rising up and grappling with the soul
again? Is this some deliberate trial of us by the Master? or some natural
spiritual sickness? Whilst in this condition we must disappoint the Beloved. On
the other hand, we find ourselves kept to the knowledge of our own impotence
and nothingness and dependence, and the spirit is strengthened by the efforts
made quickly to recover the lost beautiful estate.
Also
we become more able to feel true patience and compassion for such others as do
not know the way of escape. So we gain, maybe, more than we lose.
* * *
We
may wonder how it is that the Mighty Maker of the Universe should choose to
condescend to the mere individual piece of clay. It is incomprehensible. It is
so incomprehensible that there is but one way of looking at it. This is no
favouritism to the individual, but the evidence of a Mind with a vast plan
pursuing a way and using a likely individual. These individuals or willing
souls He takes and, setting them apart, fashions them to His own ends and
liking. Of one He will make a worker, and of another He fashions to Himself a
lover. It would seem to be His will to use the human implement to help the
human. As water, for usefulness to the many, must be collected and put through
channels, so it would seem must the beneficence of God be collected into human
vessels and channels that it may be distributed for the use of the many and the
more feeble.
* * *
The
more any man will consider humanity, the more he will see that the education of
the heart and will is of more importance than the education of the brain. For
in the perfectly trained and educated heart and will we find the evidence of
highest wisdom.
* * *
Why
mortify the body with harsh austerities? When we over-mortify the body with
fastings, pains, and penances we are remembering the flesh. Let us aim
at the forgetting and not the despising of the flesh. A sick body can be a
great hindrance to the soul. By keeping the body in a state of perfect
wholesomeness we can more easily pass away from the recollection of it.
Chastise the mind rather than the body. Christ taught, not the contempt or
wilful neglect of the body, but the humble submission of the body to all circumstances,
the obedience of the will to God, and the glorious and immeasurable
possibilities of the human spirit.
* * *
We
know that the love of the heart can be beautiful and full of zeal and fervour;
but the love of the soul by comparison to it is like a furnace, and the
capacities of the heart are not worthy to be named in the same breath. Yet,
deplorable as is the heart of man, it is evidently desired by God, and must be
given to Him before He will waken the soul. To my belief, we are quite unable to
awaken our own soul, though we are able to will to love God with the
heart, and through this we pass up to the border of the Veil of Separation,
where He will sting the soul into life and we have Perception.
After
which the soul will often be swept or plucked up into immeasurable glories and
delights which are neither imagined nor contrived, nor even desired by her at
first—for how can we desire that which we have never heard of and cannot even
imagine? And these delights are unimaginable before the soul is caught up into
them, and to my experience they constantly differ. The soul knows herself to be
in the hands and the power of another, outside herself. She does not enter
these joys of her own power or of her own will, but by permission and intention
and will of a force outside herself though perceived and known inside herself.
No lovers of arguments or guessing games can move the soul to listen when she
has once been so handled. For to know is more than to guess.
* * *
How
can a Contact with God be in any way described? It is not seeing, but meeting
and fusion with awareness. The soul retaining her own individuality and
consciousness to an intense degree, but imbued with and fused into a life of
incredible intensity, which passes through the soul vitalities and emotions of
a life so new, so vivid, so amazing, that she knows not whether she has been
embraced by love or by fire, by joy or by anguish: for so fearful is her joy
that she is almost unable to endure the might of it. And how can the heat or
fire of God be described? It is very far from being like the cruelty of fire,
and yet it is so tremendous that the mind knows of little else to compare it
to. But it is like a vibration of great speed and heat, like a fluid and
magnetic heat.
This
heat is of many degrees and of several kinds. The heat of Christ is mixed with
indescribable sweetness: giving marvellous pleasure and refreshment and
happiness, and wonderfully adapted to the delicacy of the human creature. The
heat of the Godhead is very different, and sometimes we may even feel it to be
cruel and remorseless in its very terrible and swift intensity. But the soul,
like all great lovers, never flinches or hangs back, but passionately lends
herself. If He chose to kill her with this joy she would gladly have it so.
By
these incomprehensible wonders He seems to say to the creature: "Come thou
here, that I may teach thee what is Joy; come thou here, that I may teach thee
what is Life. For none are permitted to teach of these things save I
Myself."
* * *
There
is another manner. The Spirit comes upon the soul in waves of terrible power.
Now in a rapture God descends upon the soul, catching her suddenly up in a
marvellous embrace: magnetising her, ravishing her. He is come, and He is gone.
In an ecstasy the soul goes out prepared to meet Him, seeking Him by praise and
prayer, pouring up her love towards Him; and He, condescending to her, fills
her with unspeakable delights, and at rare times He will catch her from an
ecstasy into a greater rapture. At least, so it is with me: the ecstasy is
prepared for, but in the quicker rapture (or catching up) it is He that seeks
the soul. These two conditions, though given very intermittently, become a
completely natural experience. I should say that the soul lived by this way: it
is her food and her life, which she receives with all the simplicity and
naturalness of the hungry man turning to his bodily food. But these waves of
power were something altogether new and very hard to endure. As each wave
passed I would come up out of it, as it were, gasping. It was as if something
too great for the soul to contain was being forced through her. It was as if
one should try to force at fearful pressure fluid through a body too solid to
be percolated by it. I understood nothing of what could be intended by such
happenings, neither could I give accommodation to this intensity. I tried to
make myself a wholly willing receptacle and instrument, but after the third day
of this I could not bear any more. I was greatly distressed. I could not
understand what was required of me. I gave myself totally to Him, and it was
not enough. And at last I cried to Him, saying: "I understand nothing:
forgive me, my God, for my great foolishness, but Thy power is too much for me.
Do what Thou wilt with me; I am altogether Thine. Drown me with Thy strength,
break me in pieces—I am willing; only do it quickly, my Lord, and have done
with it, for I am so small. But I love Thee with all that I have or am; yet I
am overwhelmed: I am still too little to be taught in this way, it is too much
for my strength. Yet do as Thou wilt; I love Thee, I love Thee." And He
heard me, and He ceased: and He returned to the ways that I understood and
dearly loved, and for weeks I lived in Paradise. But my body was dreadfully
shaken, and I suffered with my heart and breathing.
Shortly
after I began to know that another change had come into me. God had become
intensely my Father, and Christ the lover was gone up again into the Godhead—as
happened after my third conversion upon the hill.
So
great, so tremendous was this sense of the Fatherhood of God become that
I had only to think the word Father to seem to be instantly transported into
His very bosom. Oh, the mighty sweetness of it! But it is not an ecstasy. The
creature and soul are dead to world-life, as in a rapture or ecstasy; but the
soul is not the bride, she is the child, and, full of eager and adoring
intimacy, she flies into His ever-open arms, and never, never does she miss the
way. Oh, the sweetness of it, the great, great glory of it, and the folly of
words! If only all the world of men and women could have this joy! How to help
even one soul towards it is what fills my heart and mind. How convince them,
how induce them to take the first steps? It is the first steps we need to take.
He does not drive, He calls. "Come to Me," He calls. It is this
failure to have the will to go to Him which is the root of all human woe. Would
we but take the first few steps towards Him, He will carry us all the rest of
the way. These first few steps we take holding to the hand of Jesus. For the
so-called Christian there is no other way (but he is no Christian until he has
taken it). For the Buddhist, doubtless, Gautama is permitted to do the same.
But for those who are baptized in Jesus Christ's name, He is their only Way.
Source: Project Gutenberg
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