St Louis brought the Crown of Thorns to Paris, and installed it, with unrecognised appropriateness, in the centre of her seething life; a jewelled symbol of the sovereignty towards which Life, at its best, must ever aspire.
It is the way of humanity to crown its chosen sovereigns with dead things: terrible instruments, wrought with much pain and cunning from the wealth with which it weighs itself down. But when Divine Love broke in on them, those by whom He was despised and rejected did Him, unaware, a greater honour. They took and crowned Him with a diadem torn from the very stuff of life: a diadem possessing life’s dreadful qualities of pain and loveliness, of thorns and flowers. They could not give the one without the other: so, all unwittingly they wreathed His brows with beauty whilst they crowned Him with the cruel chaplet of ignominious pain.
Ego dedi tibi sceptrum regale; et tu dedisti capiti meo spineam coronam.
| “I gave to thee the royal sceptre: and thou hast given to My head the Crown of Thorns.” (Ibid.) |
Heavy with life, it lay upon His head the imperial crown of humility, won by the agony of the garden and the bitter abasement of the pillar. Even at that hour of coming death, the sap was running in those branches, which seemed so sterile and so hard. The flowery crown of Easter morning is but the thorny crown of Calvary.
The crown of life, then, pressed down upon the brow of life’s initiate, is the one great gift the world confers on the growing soul in this dolorous way. Here, in its own despite, it does honour to that Life which it despises and rejects. Paradoxically, as a part of the very process of condemnation, it proclaims the victory of growing Spirit. It feels the sharpness of the thorns that it inflicts, and rejoices in them: but the budding roses in their axils it cannot see.
“They wove for me a crown of truth, and it caused Thy branches to bud in me,
For it is not like a withered crown which buddeth not:
But Thou livest upon my head, and Thou hast blossomed upon my head.
Thy fruits are full grown and perfect; they are full of Thy salvation.”
“It caused Thy branches to bud in me!” Still the mystery of growth is with the soul, governing its experience even in this dark hour, working in it the wonderful paradox of tribulation, the upspringing of life and beauty beneath the burden of failure and grief. “It is not like a withered crown. . . . Thou livest upon my head.” His abounding life dispensed under the strangest of disguises; His benediction resting on the very instruments of most bitter mortification, and making of them the dearest gifts of love.
He demanded of us the subjection of our physical life, the surrender of the body’s dignity and power to the purposes of ascending spirit; and according to our self-giving power we gave it. Now, the regnant mind, the piercing intellect that probed the world’s secrets, the quick imagination that ran before our feet to look upon the secrets of His love—these dearest qualities of ours, that we wished only to dedicate to His service, to remake in the interests of His life, He takes, as it seems, that He may break and degrade them before the amused and malicious eyes of other men. We must be fools, glad fools, for Christ’s sake: all has been given us, and all we must give again. So, after the outward indignity of the scourging the soul must face that more subtle torture, the mockery of the royal crown: the world’s most poignant criticism, the act by which it marks its sense of spirit’s strangeness and separation—the wild arrogance, as it seems, of its pretensions, the irrational absurdity of its dreams. We offer the world our love, and it repays us with a pretended reverence bowing the knee whilst it steels the heart. It is not ashamed to find immortal spirit “interesting,” even in the hour in which it consigns it to the Cross.
Yet against its will, as it were, the world helps the work which must be done within us. It, too, is an instrument held in the sure and skilful hand of God. It is teaching us the “gymnastic of Eternity,” the high lessons of the School of Perfect Resignation making plain the way on which we are to travel, bringing us the only food that can nourish and support our stormy love.
“Bring thorns for the path of the enthusiast,
His love would have them daggers”—
and it makes them as sharp as it can, barbs them with ridicule, little knowing that the wounds which they inflict are the secret pathways by which His love and grace come in: or that the dreadful wreath into which they are platted is the ensign of the soul’s eternal sovereignty.
“Christ hath crowned me,” said St Agnes in the brothel, “with the bright and priceless blossoms of the Eternal Spring”—sweet radiance, purity, and fruitfulness, His beauty perpetually upspringing, given out of the deeps of bodily degradation for the adornment of the virgin soul. As those who run in the games for a perishable garland, so we have brought our body into subjection, have sought even at the pillar the harsh discipline of the spiritual athlete; that we may win an imperishable crown. Now at last it is given us; not under circumstance of outward triumph, but so as our victory may seem to the world defeat.
“From glory to glory advancing, we praise Thee, the Saviour of Souls,” as we go from garden to pillar, from the judgment-hall to the cross. We tread a primrose path, though our eyes are holden: we grow up into the fullness of His stature, our weakness the very condition of His strength. Whether it be the slow process of nature or the deliberate art of man to which we are submitted, “all serveth,” says Boehme, “but abundantly to manifest the wonderful works of God, that He for all and in all may be glorified. Yea, all serveth if thou knowest rightly how to use it, only to recollect thee more inwards, and to draw thy spirit into that majestic Light wherein the original patterns and forms of things visible are to be seen. Keep therefore in the Centre, and stir not from the Presence of God revealed within thy soul.”
In the Light which fills that secret place is laid up for us the pattern of our imperishable Crown. It is made of roses, wild and fragrant, and “in each rose is written the word Love.” To that centre we may retreat, though the world clamour about us, to offer Him the fruits of our surrender, made manifest in pain. What else indeed is there that we can give, from our poor little treasure-house, so nearly worthy of His acceptance as this? How else could we exhibit the heroic quality of our love? In the deep silence of the growing garden, our wills were made over to His Will, in the judgment-hall of human opinion, our bodies were submitted to the scourge—yes, to anything that might befall them; worse, the purple robe of an inglorious honour was set about our shoulders by those who will never understand. Now, the head made bare for His unction receives the thorny crown, and with it a new and deeper participation in the eternal passion of His Christ. Man’s dearest pride, the instrument of his deep thought and piercing vision, the citadel of his power; the secret garden as he fancies, where alone he has rapt communion with his dream—this must taste the humiliation which is more bitter than the pangs of death. Bit by bit, the Whole Man is to be brought within the magic ring of suffering. The totality of human nature, Body, Soul, and Spirit, must be welded together in the likeness of the humiliation of Christ; that we may follow in His footsteps on the dolorous way which leads to the Father’s heart. The Salt, the Sulphur, and the Mercury—all must be cast into pain’s crucible. There the fire of love shall transmute them into the substance of Spiritual Gold.
“‘Love not too much.’ But how,
When Thou hast made me such,
And dost Thy gifts bestow,
How can I love too much?
Though I must fear to lose,
And drown my joy in care,
With all its thorns I choose
The path of love and prayer.”
