It is not the consummation towards which spirit had looked at the beginning of its journey: that Divine Manhood, that wholeness of life perfected and completed in Him, toward which the regenerate soul, it thought, should grow. But now that soul has learned that love is enough for it, and that only in the extreme of surrender can love have its perfect work. Like some homing star which has burned its way swifter and ever swifter to the sphere that called it, purged and made shining by the ardour of its flight, it rushes through the shrouding darkness to its Origin. All its desire now is to be lost in Him. It thinks no more of its own transcendence; of its little separate achievement, its spirituality, its pain. Only it wants to "go forward, and get nearer to the Eternal Goodness" if it can. By effort and sacrifice it would do it, for its love is vital, and wears the colours of chivalry and romance. It asks for difficulties; for opportunity of endurance. In the end no smoother way could have been bearable to it than the Royal Highway of the Cross. The choice, the effort, the self-stripping, the purging and transmuting fires—even the darkness, desolation, and abandonment, the bitterness of the spiritual death—were they not needed, the soul had almost demanded them, that thus it might test for Him its courage and its faith. Here is the true blessedness of spirit’s imprisonment in the body, its submission to the imperfections and limitations of the flesh; that so by heroic effort, by the heavenly romance of self-donation, it might win its way to freedom; working out its salvation in fear and trembling, yet in the joyous exercise of industrious and courageous love, till the Eternal Christ is disclosed in the fullness of His beauty and His power.
O certe necessarium Adæ peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est! O felix culpa, quæ talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem!
| "Oh surely needful was the sin of Adam, which was blotted out by the death of Christ! Oh happy fault, which was worthy of such, and of so great a ransom!" (Roman Missal: Office for Holy Saturday: Exultet.) |
Dear, happy fault, which gave us something to do for Him; oh, deepest secret of divinest music, the disharmony which had to be resolved.
Compelled to the gesture of a boundless generosity, its arms outstretched to the embrace of all things—the evil and the lovely, the clean and the unclean—its heart made wider by the wound which pierced it, thereby to make space for the entrance of His all-demanding love—here it is that the fullness of Creative Energy seizes upon the finite human creature; here at last is consummated the spiritual marriage of the soul. Long time the Love without has called to Love within; but the ramparts of the sense-life must be broken before their mysterious transfusion can take place. A perfect abjection and a total self-spending are asked, as the price of our union with God. Christ Himself showed us this pathway; and declared to us the paradox of life upspringing from corruption and death. He, the supremely Real, trod first for us this difficult bridge which spans the gulf between Appearance and Reality, and leads from a dying world to the heart of intensest life. Paul, following in His footsteps, turned back his transfigured countenance to cry to us, "Dying, and behold I live! God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross."
Here the Body and Blood of God were broken and spilt for us; not alone the bodily expression, the manifestation in Time, but the Spirit of Life itself, "the blood which is the life thereof," He gave. That pouring out of the Precious Blood, the Divine Life, upon the cross of suffering, renewed on every altar, experienced afresh by every soul that comes face to face with Reality, has ever been discerned by Christians as the condition of salvation for the individual and the race. Life itself was then given—"more abundant life" for the world—a fresh dower of vitality, to stimulate the languid soul to new creative acts.
Accipiens et hunc præclarum Calicem in sanctas ac venerabiles manus suas; item tibi gratias agens benedixit, deditque discipulis suis, dicens: Accipite et bibite ex eo omnes. Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis mei, novi et æterni testamenti; mysterium fidei; qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur in remissionem peccatorum. Hæc quotiescumque feceritis, in mei memoriam facietis.
| "Taking also this excellent Chalice into His holy and venerable hands, and giving thanks to Thee, He blessed and gave it to His disciples, saying, "Take, and drink ye all of this. For this is the Chalice of my Blood, the new and eternal testament; the mystery of faith; which shall be shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins. As often as ye do these things, ye shall do them in remembrance of Me." (Roman Missal: Canon of the Mass.) |
Do this in renewal of My memory, following in the footsteps of life. Give as I have given; freely ye have received, freely give. All—body, soul, and spirit—is asked of you: a complete offering upon the great altar of the world. In your own interest I ask it: do, that you may know. Nothing can explain to us the mystery of Love and Pain but a sharing of it. Nothing can initiate us into the Life of God which is our peace, if we turn from the cleaving sword of sacrifice and outstretched arms which make up the everlasting mercy of the Cross. The first for rebellious matter, the second for homeward-rushing spirit. Both for Man and Man only—freely offered to him—the instruments of his deification, the signs of a veritable partaking of the life of Christ.
"For He desires," says Ruysbroeck, with the strange and violent imagery of the great mystic who is struggling to describe an intuition which transcends the resources of speech, "He desires to consume our very life, in order that He may change it into His own. . . . Were our eyes keen enough to see this the avid appetite of Christ, Who hungers for our salvation, all our efforts could not keep us from flying to His open mouth. I seem to speak follies; but all who love will understand. For the love of Jesus is of a noble nature. That which He devours He would feed. When He has utterly devoured us, then it is that He gives Himself to us: and endows us with an eternal hunger and thirst."
"He brought me to the banqueting house, and His banner over me was love." Yes, but it seems to the fastidious earthly appetite, the feeble, shrinking human creature, that harshest bread and bitter herbs are the matter of this marriage feast; and the narrow bed of the Cross is cruel to those whose members are unmortified. The soul is held there transfixed in the gathering darkness, enduring the terrible assaults of His grace, the agonies of His initiatory caress, "consumed yet quickened by the glance of God." The dark hours pass, yet it seems that dawn will never come. But even in its despair the loving soul is glad to give itself, for since He asks it, who could demand a better fate?
"I understood," says Julian of this august experience, "that we be now, in our Lord’s meaning, in His Cross with Him in His pains and His passion, dying; and we, willingly abiding in the same Cross with His help and His grace unto the last point, suddenly He shall change His cheer to us, and we shall be with Him in heaven. Betwixt that one and the other shall be no time, and then shall all be brought to joy."
"All shall be brought to joy." The fire of love at last shall do its perfect work in us; in the twinkling of an eye we shall be changed. The mystics, casting about for metaphors that shall hint at these strange adventures of the spirit, say that the soul endures upon the Cross not the pains of death but the travail of yet another birth—a difficult, slow birth, that brings it into the steady radiance of a diviner day. It comes forth from the sheltering womb of nature, in which it has lain so warm, so safe, so blind. The last traces of the earth-life pass from it in its agony: all those unrealities, all those checks upon its truest freedom, which it thought essential to its joy. They are going: and in their wake there go at last the dark night, the loneliness and the horror, expressions one and all of a charity as yet imperfect, which dared not all to hope nor all endure. The dawn comes, and peace with it—the day breaks, shadows flee from us; and all at last is brought to blessedness.
"Passing away, saith my God, passing away;
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray.
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.
Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray.
Arise, come away, night is past, and lo, it is day,
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea."
