The mysteries of the Ascension and of Pentecost, taken together, may well represent to us the necessary double action of the complete and wholly conscious human spirit: its solitary and prayerful ascents to God, its eager and outflowing activity towards the world of men. "The possession of God," says Ruysbroeck, "demands and supposes a perpetual activity": each upward rush towards communion with His Perfect Beauty involves a return to the restless and imperfect world of Becoming, a sharing in the creative industries of His Immanent Love.
There have been mystics who fancied that the ecstatic ascent to Pure Being, that Mentis alienatio which seemed to Richard of St Victor the perfect consummation of all prayer, was the end of the soul’s career. They held that those whom Beatrice led up the Celestial Ladder were not destined to come down again; thus passing a sentence of sterility upon the spiritual marriage of the soul. But the true ecstasy of the contemplative snatched up to fruition of God is an ascent undertaken in the interests of humanity, even as our Forerunner ascended in order that "the Paraclete might come." Every Christian soul is brother to Prometheus, and seeks the heavenly fire, not for his own glory but because he must transmit it to the race. He is a thoroughfare: a completed self, but not, for that very reason, self-sufficing: doubly dependent, rather, on the vivifying grace that he receives and on the eager service that he gives. Thus the ascension into heaven was but the opening episode of Divine Humanity’s true and eternal activities: the condition of that fecundity, that unexhaustible self-spending, that power of spiritual creation, proper to a life which is fulfilled of God. He that has made ascensions to the Father, let the proof of his transcendence be a humble and willing return to the sphere of illusion, as a part of that great spiritual chivalry, that knighthood of the Paraclete, which defends and guides and strengthens life on its upward path.
There is here then no selfish abstraction from the actual, no deliberate neglect of the lovely life of service which is Christ’s; but one-half of the completed self-expression of man in his wholeness, that citizen of time and of Eternity, "swinging between the Unseen and the Seen." The transfigured life, the new universe to which he has been lifted, the One by Whom that life and universe are filled, demand of the new man a wholeness of response: a world-renouncing response to Love Transcendent ever enticing him, a world-accepting response to Love Immanent, which ever calls him to share and to comfort the pain and weakness of created things. Humblest charity, highest contemplation: these are the facets of that crystal which shall reflect the Inaccessible Light.
But these difficult responses to Finite and to Infinite shall and must depend on a constant renewal and refreshing; on a contact with the Transcendent "never to be lost or broken," on a conscious self-mergence of the soul "as a fish in the sea, as a bird in the air," in the Infinite Being of God. They shall depend on the soul’s continual nurture by His feeding and inflowing Grace: given in the days of our weakness as dew upon the tender grass, and in the stormy times of our adolescence as the drenching vivifying showers; now sweeping as a mighty wind through the airy kingdoms of the spirit, and blessing, fertilising, where it goes.
Jacob Boehme, that deep gazer into the secrets of God, has somewhere a mysterious saying about the "Outflown Word": an image, as it were, of the Divine Wisdom rushing out as a great wind from its own centre and passing through the meshes of the Cosmos, a swift and searching tempest of life. That wind blows where it lists, filling with its sound the whole world of Becoming; sometimes a storm of inspiration, sometimes a murmurous and refreshing breeze. Earth treads her cyclic path about the floor of heaven enfolded in the music of its gale. It stirs in all natural things and compels them to a manifestation of its beauty. It collects and it scatters. It enables and it slays. It moves the souls of men who know it not, evoking in them diversities of gifts.
The winds of the world in their passage move to new and various qualities of loveliness each living thing they touch. They toss the great boughs into the air and fill them with a wild and passionate delight. They dapple with delicate and shaded glories the surface of the fields. They stir the grave wheat to measured rhythms, make a fringed mystery of the barley, give to the oats a delicate playfulness, an elfin quality of life. They drive the cloudy castles over the long savannahs of the blue. Everywhere they inspire change, life, movement; forcing the sap upwards through the living, swaying branches, shaking the fertile pollen from the flowers, stirring thought and passion, giving beauty for ashes, music for silence, energising enthusiastically in the interests of Eternal Wisdom and Eternal Joy.
"As the hand moves over the harp and the strings speak, so speaks in my members the Spirit of the Lord, and I speak by His Love."
The psalm of that perpetual adoration can be heard of all in sea and forest. No less, in the angels’ ears, its acceptable melody may be discerned in the home and cloister, in the studio, the workshop, and the shrine. To some participation in this angelic awareness of the Wind of God our new life must introduce us: to a natural and active world, swept everywhere by those untamed and vital breezes—a world that is in all its activities inspired.
This new and unifying consciousness of Spirit, comes to us from without; completing for us the Trinity in Unity of a reality that is and must be conterminous with God. In the joys of the spiritual childhood we have known His care and protection as a Father. In a sharing of His sufferings and His efforts, we have known the travail of the Son. Now in our maturity we know Him as Omnipresent Spirit, the one Reality of all that is: and we ask for the fullness of that Spirit to be upon us, that we may live with the full span of its immortal and creative life.
"Wild Spirit which art moving everywhere,
Destroyer and Preserver, hear, O hear!"
And our prayer is answered, since it is made in lowliness of heart. Suddenly His life is amongst us in its fullness. It penetrates the world of things, and lights on us as we sit amongst our kind. As flaming fire, as rushing wind, it seems to us in its power and wonder. We are changed by its advent; the hard edges of personality are broken. We find new doors set wide in the encompassing walls of our selfhood; the gift of many tongues, new and various possibilities of expression, new instruments of communion with our fellow-men. "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions"—all the splendid possibilities of seer and artist, of the philosopher, musician, and poet, of the revealers of beauty, the deep gazers into things Divine, are included in the Pentecostal gift. His hand sweeps our strings, and evokes new music which we did not dream that we possessed.
But above all it shall sting us to service: to a flaming enthusiasm of ministry, to a declaration and expression of the unsearchable riches of God. His word is with power: it is a dynamic force in those whom it has entinctured, pressing them on to a glad and eager co-operation in the Divine Plan. Part of His mystical body now, they would not be idle members,—"would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man." The adult spirit looks upon a new world; yet all about it are its brothers, whose eyes are sealed to the ever-present landscape of Reality. New astounding deeps of experience must be declared to them; and for this, new contacts and mutual understandings must be set up. The arduous communication of the secret of Eternity to each man in a language that he can understand—the language of Science, the language of Beauty, the language of Love—bridges flung out on all sides between the soul of the mystic and other souls of all races, grades, and faiths—universal and exuberant self-donation: this only is the earnest of a life that has attained to its full stature, the mark of man’s acceptance as fellow-craftsman with Christ. "I will not leave you comfortless, I will come unto you." Here, through and by the soul that it transfigures, made now the elect vessel of grace, we behold the eternal return, the sudden and generous flowering of the omnipotent Spirit of Love.
Not for nothing did the old painters put our Lady in the very centre of the Pentecostal scene. The soul that has borne God shall spend God. She is the supreme thoroughfare of the Divine Life; and because of the perfection of her union with that life, she receives more abundantly its renewal and its energising fire. Dear, human, and maternal life is here transfigured and made vocative: not merely by the inrush of Divine power and the flooding tide of spirit, but by that greater gift of flaming charity which is the only language of the heart.
Power and charity; the will and the heart blessed to His service, all barriers broken that His Love may pour through us, and be poured out by our human ministry upon all flesh. A universal and fraternal communion is here asked of us: in such a communion the inexpressible gift of His inrushing spirit is first felt. Here, then, is something new in the soul’s adventures. Here is forced on it the fusion, not only with God, but with other men in Him: the social experience of Reality, the social act of communion and of prayer. Dependent here as ever on the hard and eager work of the individual will, yet the result which is attained is no merely individual achievement. Of all, through all, in all, the flooding tide of the Eternal Life is felt. "Orate fratres," says the priest at the altar, "ut meum ac vestrum sacrificium acceptabile fiat apud Deum Patrem omnipotentum."
| "Pray, my brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the Father Almighty." (Roman Missal: Ordinary of the Mass.) |
Set your wills with mine towards the Father; buoy up my little prayer upon your wings. Here is the root of all corporate worship exhibited, and here in this mystery its part in the triumph of life is expressed: the anxious, prayerful, loyal ranks of the Apostles, with the Virgin Mother in the midst; diverse in temperament, diverse in power and vision, yet here welded together in one great instrument, one Body for the Spirit of Christ. Here Mary, who alone on Carmel had been found in her lowliness worthy to be the Mother of her God, humbles herself anew to a dependence on, a co-operation with all those whom that Life which she bore and nurtured has entinctured and redeemed.
Such corporate prayer is in strong souls and pure the highest exercise of charity: in weak souls the glad and humble acceptance of a priceless gift. It is the mark and bond of fraternal love, the bearing of one another’s burdens, the perfect fulfilment of the Law of Life. "Alone to the Alone," said the Pagan mystic, and knew than this no closer approximation to the Real. "Væ soli," says the Christian. We seek not the flame of separation. Accendat in nobis Dominus ignem sui amoris, et flammam æternæ caritatis!
| "May the Lord enkindle in us the fire of His love, and the flame of eternal charity." (Ibid.) |
We seek that fire which is the fount of life, the flame of eternal charity; in which, as live coals, "we are burned up by God on the hearth of His infinite love."
