The Spiral Way
Evelyn Underhill
The Sorrowful Mysteries of the Soul's Ascent
Note: Footnotes have been appended in text in a pale blue box.
The Bearing of the Cross
When the chivalry of the squire has been tested he may ride with his Lord in the lists. When the education of the climber has prospered, he may set his face towards the hills. So, disciplined in mind and body by the cruelest oppositions which the world of things can offer, pilgrim man must now prepare to leave that world behind him: set out upon his long viaticum of ascent. "The Love of God," says Angela of Foligno, "is never idle; for it constrains us to follow the Way of the Cross." Pressing in on us, transfusing us, encompassing us as an atmosphere, thrusting Life forward on is long quest of Perfection, that stern and tender love compels its children to the only journey which leads home. It blocks all other paths so easy and so tempting for us—the way of knowledge, the way of beauty, even the way of human goodness with the rest. The enticement and the pursuit, the companionship and the loneliness, the light and the shadow of the Divine Desire all these in their interplay force us to one narrow, peopled path; a path of unutterable harshness that leads as it seems to the place of death, yet shall lead us if we trust it to the only country of the soul.
The pilgrimage to Calvary is the third stage in Life’s long drama of self-giving; the self-giving upon which the soul resolved when it came forth from the Garden of Prayer. Since we are "made-trinity, like to the unmade blissful Trinity," three-fold must be our self-yielding to its love. "Man," says Tauler, "is just as though he were formed of three men; his animal nature, in which he is guided by his senses; his powers of reason; and his highest nature, which is in the image and likeness of God." We have left our sensual nature bound to the pillar. Itself a captive, we have no more to fear from its assaults. Our reason we have submitted to that thorny crown of humiliation, which waits for every initiate of the Sorrowful Mysteries of Christ. Now, we must leave both behind us; and, ascending "above reason and beyond reason," "go up alone with the Son into the secret place, the Holy of Holies," that we may offer our utmost sacrifice, that is, our very selves, and enter in, "hiding the secret mind in the mystery of the Divine Abyss." Even whilst the spirit sorrows beneath its burden, it knows that it is going to its Love; that this is the only way to perfect union with the Godhead, the veritable thoroughfare of life. "What ask I of thee more, but that thou study to resign thyself to Me entirely? What thing soever thou givest Me else I care not for."
We stretched our hearts and minds towards Him, blind yet desirous; growing, as we hoped, gently yet from glory to glory in His image, striving towards the fullness of the stature of Christ. Now we begin to feel in its irresistible power the pull of His terrible attraction. Steadily, remorselessly, it draws us along the cruel road that seems to lead to the spiritual death. The Voice says again: "As nothing should suffice thee without Me, likewise nothing may please Me whatsoever thou shalt give, if thou offer not thyself to Me." And we, full of fear yet full of adoration, go forward step by step, driven by that all-conquering impulse; by God without Who calls to God within. His attraction it is that compels us, yet we think that we do it ourselves: as the crumb of steel caught within the magnetic area may congratulate itself upon the swiftness with which it runs to its appointed and inevitable place.
"And all this," says Julian, Diotima of the Symposium of Christ’s lovers, "showed He full blissfully, signifying thus:
"See! I am God: see! I am in all thing: see! I do all thing; see! I lift never mine hands off my works, nor ever shall, without end: see! I lead all thing to the end I ordained it to from without beginning, by the same Might, Wisdom, and Love whereby I made it. How should anything be amiss?"
How indeed should anything be amiss with the soul which is brought to birth in Him? Even on the Sorrowful Way, in manifold failures and humiliations, it lives and moves and has its being within the charmed circle of His grace. Men think that it suffers hell, yet it stands in heaven for it knows, in the midst of squalor and of anguish, in the midst of its struggles and its falls, that His hands are never lifted from His works. Thus He shapes and thus transmutes us: slowly distilling the perdurable tincture of Eternity from the crude and unenduring stuff of time. This is His way: and shall we ask another? "Dost thou think to escape what never mortal man might escape? What saint in this world was without cross and tribulation?"
As the joyful mystery of the Visitation, so is the mystery of this slow and bitter climb to death. It is a way of prayer: a mystical ascent to new and close communion with our Master, along the least promising of paths. It is a plumbing of all experience, even the terrible experience of spiritual failure, that we may seek and find Him in the very deeps. It is a way of dark contemplation; for we move as it were in His shadow, yet cannot see Him at our side. We go in great solitude; though the populations of the earth are close about us, and the populations of Eternity are surely there to bless. Out of the midst of our hard climbing, the slow, difficult course—the dust, the heat, the burden, only actual to us—we look as from an infinite distance, at the world we have known so well. Yet our path lies through that world. The Holy Mountain we are climbing rises amongst its tenements and streets; and its inhabitants come out to us as we struggle up the steep monotonous pathway, to urge, to help, to grieve. Strange adventures befall us as we plod upwards. Not pain and effort alone shall be our portion. We go through the midst of life; it flows about us, presses upon our consciousness in every shape and form. Sweet human Love meets us; and we turn from her imploring eyes with terror, for she must not withhold us from our destiny. Wayfaring Love meets us, plain and homely; and eases, as none other can, the cruel burden of the Cross. Intuitive Love runs to our encounter, ministers to us in our distress; mysteriously discerning in our features, distorted though they be with weariness and anguish, the Veritable Image of its Friend. The amateurs of Religious Sentiment meet us; and perhaps their facile pity is the hardest thing the soul has got to bear. They are interested in its struggle, and follow for a little way, stepping delicately to avoid the mud and stones but they deplore the ill-regulated enthusiasm which has led to this piteous pass. Religion, they think, should be calm, sweet, and beautiful; the way that leads to God should be run without dust or heat. They will go home, to weep over their pretty pious books, kneeling upon their comfortable hassocks; safe as it were in a respectable and stagnant backwater, far from those raging torrents which pour towards the Infinite Sea.
As for the soul brought to this bitter mystery, all its love and will, all its strength and endurance, must now be set upon one point. Desire and thought shall sink almost into abeyance; so central for its consciousness must be the passionate effort, the tense determination to bear all things "according to His will." Bit by bit it must struggle upwards, slipping, falling; its manliness is being tested here if ever, under the crushing burden of the saving Cross. The shadow of that Cross lies for it upon Creation, a term which delimits without error the kingdoms of the unreal and the real. "Behold! in the Cross all doth consist." It dominates the lover’s consciousness, and reduces all else that cannot live within its radiance to the ranks of the shadowy and the insecure. To bear it, is to bear His primal secret with us; the merciless touchstone of truth, strong even in our utmost weakness. The phantoms fly before it all the pious fancies, all the ethical pretensions, all the philosophic dreams." For the word of the Cross is to them that are perishing foolishness; but to us that are being saved it is the Power of God"—His Wisdom in a mystery, declaring in inexorable, sternest action that deepest secret of the universe which shall never be communicated in words. "One desire only," says St John of the Cross, "does God allow and suffer in His Presence: that of perfectly observing His law, and of carrying the Cross of Christ. In the Ark of the Covenant there was but the Book of the Law, the Rod of Aaron, the Pot of Manna. Even so that soul which has no other aim than the perfect observance of the Law of God, and the carrying of the Cross of Christ, will be a true Ark containing the true Manna, which is God."
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1906 - The Miracles of Our Lady Saint Mary
1911 - Mysticism
1912 - Introduction to The Cloud of Unknowing
1913 - The Mystic Way
1914 - Introduction: Richard Rolle - The Fire of Love
1915 - Practical Mysticism
1915 - Introduction: Songs of Kabir
1916 - Introduction: John of Ruysbroeck
1920 - The Essentials of Mysticism, and other Essays
1922 - The Spiral Way
1922 - The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (Upton Lectures)
1926 - Concerning the Inner Life
1928 - Man and the Supernatural
1929 - The House of the Soul
1933 - The Golden Sequence
1933 - Mixed Pasture: Twelve Essays
1936 - The Spiritual Life
1943 - Introduction to the Letters of Evelyn Underhill
by Charles Williams
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