That jewel in the making, the ever growing crystal of Divine Humanity, seems destined to reflect from every facet some new aspect of the infinitely various Being of God; the inexhaustible simplicity of Christ. Each soul that is added to it, cut and polished by the sharp and steady action of grace, offers a fresh angle to the incoming Divine Light; gives a fresh picture of its love to the world. Yet there is a unity in this variousness; for all are centred on one point, each grows by the laws which rule the universal growth, each draws its very life from one sacred heart. They are one, because they belong to the mystical and eternal fellowship of Jesus. For each to live is Christ; and to grow is to assimilate the simple yet difficult secret of His growth. They are many, since to each His life in them is a separate and peculiar gift, taking character from the temperament through which it is received. Thus His mystical body of many members is built up in our midst.
To its share in the building of that body—to its part in that drama of growth—it is certain that the soul of man is dedicated in advance. Here is the spiritual vocation of the race: a vocation resisted only at the cost of a complete stagnation, of a rejecting of all that is enduring and significant, all that is beautiful and good. That tendency to Deity of which philosophers speak to us, is inherent in our living world of change. There is a Voice that cries to us out of the storm of Becoming: that demands our co-operation, inviting us to great surrender and great joy. The Spirit of Christ sweeps through the world on its journey to the Father: and in virtue of its supreme attraction, its compelling power, catches to itself every lesser spirit on its path. It cries, “Follow! Follow!” to recalcitrant life, lagging behind it: life, ever tending to turn on its own tracks, to be satisfied with something a little lower than its best possible, sinking back upon an inglorious and comfortable past. It entices, and it pursues. “He who loves, knows that Voice,” said Thomas à Kempis; and he who hears it, is caught by that cosmic music into the deep enchantment of the lover, for in its cadence is the very sorcery of love. In its accents is celestial beauty; the magical appeal of ecstasy and pain, offering us the final choice between that generous surrender which is heaven and that terrified refusal which is hell. It speaks to us in every growing, changing thing; it speaks in the stars and in the shrouded fields; calling us to a conscious sharing in the mighty business of the spiritual world. It demands incarnation, and seeks for self-expression; not upon some far-off intangible plane of being, but in the here-and-now experience of the race. And the virgin soul hidden somewhere within us recognises it; stirring in her slumbers, as though that insistent Ave of the Universe had reached her through the barriers of the flesh.
According to the deep saying of the theologians, the Father, primal and unconditioned Essence of the God-head, can only know Himself as mirrored in the Son. The undeclared riches of Deity take form in the wisdom of His energetic Word; and God finds Himself in the Eternal Christ. So too the Son, our Friend and Lover, source and pattern of our perfection, broods eternally above humanity, and seeks to see himself mirrored in man’s soul. And as from the ecstatic encounter of the two primal aspects of Reality there flashed into being a third form, the Holy Spirit of their Love, whereby the Trinity in Unity was made complete: so another Love, that mystic passion which interweaves Divine and Human nature, is born of the encounter between the Eternal Christ and the spirit of man. This love it is which stings to life a latent thing within us, and sets in hand the supernatural drama of the soul’s career.
Because of this all-powerful love, because of that community of interests which it operates, we are a part now of the pageant of Christ’s glory: motes, transfigured by the effulgence of His mystical body, our separated lives surrendered to the unresting movement of His will. There comes a moment when a strange new growth begins in us: when we find that we are set on a new path, begin to ascend towards fresh levels of being, now supremely "natural” because inevitable for us, yet closed to our vision in the past. We see before us the footsteps of our companion, showing us where we must tread: passing by many terrible places where our little, human life could never go alone. He moves thus towards His goal, and we must follow; for irresistible love has made us one with Him. He grows thus to His full stature, for He is Very Life: and we, desiring His gift of life in its abundance, must learn its secret if we can. Here, if ever, we see that Life in its wholeness, incarnate, free, and regnant; untainted by disharmonies, growing to its perfect consummation in God. Here the mystery of transcendence is disclosed to us: spirit flaming up and out, through the world of matter, to its goal. In Jesus, that spirit finds its perfect thoroughfare. But in us there is roadmaking to be done, the hard cutting of new paths: only to be accomplished in so far as we follow His methods and grow with His growth.
How, then, shall we grow? and what shall be the curve that marks our progress—that “way,” as the mystics call it, which is a journey and a transmutation in one? Where, on the wide horizons or in the inaccessible heavens, lies the goal towards which we are to hew a path? Did we ask this of eager, striving Nature, she would be hard-pressed perhaps to answer us; for her achievements seem to lie in all directions, stretching sheaf-like towards every point. Since God is not Height alone but Depth and Breadth, transcending yet transfusing all, Life in her flight to Him may take all pathways. Her outgoing, expansive tendency may everywhere achieve success, for He is the Point in which all lines must end. This we see, and all the wonder and the greatness of it: we stand awed and bewildered before her innumerable adjustments and contrivances, her exquisite and complicated arts.
Yet these achievements and these arts are not for us. High above life, yet utterly within it—transcending all its ever-changing beauty, yet that very beauty’s energising soul—we discern the Eternal Christ; with whom and in whom we, since we are carried on Life’s crest, must surely seek to live. He reigns in virtue of a transcendent vitality, a summing up and excelling of Creation: and we can only achieve union with Him in so far as we are able to grow towards that most human and impassioned self-expression of the victorious life of God. But the transition is too difficult for us. We need a guide and a pathfinder, some merely human thing that went before us through the jungle, and made in our name the essential contact with Reality. We need in fact the natural simplicity of Mary to lead us to our supernatural self-mergence in Christ; maternal life to show us the secret whereby she brought forth in our very midst the Son of God.
Mary, then, protagonist of this great drama, may stand for us as the representative of the race in its mighty encounter with God, the incarnate genius of humanity: its perfect product, and its long-sought dream. She is Life indeed—our life—the very Mother of men. Nourished upon that breast held in safe contact with that homeliness, we may endure without fear our difficult re-birth into a strange universe. Under that mantle of mercy we may struggle up the spiral way on which she passed to her enthronement at the very centre of Reality. “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”: for indeed the holy thing which is born of that surrendered spirit can be no other than Divine Humanity itself. Here we see as in a mirror the soul’s august possibilities expressed.
So contemplating the image of Mary, so following as it were with dreamy love the unrolling of the pageant of her soul, bit by bit the necessary adventures of our own soul on its long quest of transcendence, become clear. We begin to discern the intimate construction of our life: the organic laws which must govern the unfolding of its flower. We begin to see that as the great drama of Reality is the music of God, so the growing spirit of man is somewhat like a symphony; that it too has as its central fact a theme divinely developed, first stated in its simplicity, then manifested through a movement which is all strife and passion, bringing ever to richer and deeper expression by means of that toil and conflict the holy growing theme; finally, that it has a reprise in which the Divine theme transcends those stormy oppositions, and is lifted to higher levels of power, of beauty, and of peace. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis; so runs the dialectic of the spirit. As with the mysteries of the Christian drama, so too with the experience of the individual soul. In joy, in sorrow, and in triumph the romantic melody of our inner life is expressed: the “ecclesiastical music” of our eager yet imperfect imitation of Christ.
Year by year the Christian Church, with life’s peculiar instinct for the recapitulation of her own methods, plays out this symphony before us; his heavenly story of our growth in God. From Advent to Assumptiontide it runs: “from glory to glory advancing” through the joyful mysteries of Christmas and Epiphany, and the sorrowful mysteries of the Passion, to the triumphant mystery of Resurrection, and of that transcendent and eternal life of the deified Spirit which is heralded by the Easter-fact. A threefold ascent, a spiral way, is then made clear before us, as the pathway from appearance to reality: once fully accomplished in history by our Master, and therefore demanded according to its measure from each awakened soul. The inspiring spirit of this ascent is to be no negative, aloof ejection of that given and apparent world. Rather from first to last, it is a steady uplifting of all things into the order of Divine Reality. The whole of man’s nature—will, intellect, and love—is concerned in it: it keeps in warmest human fashion close hold upon the Here and Now. At once a journey, yet a development; a stripping off, yet a completing; a victory, yet a self-loss; only in a paradox can its supernal nature be made clear.
A wholeness, at once Divine and human—the veritable expression of the Eternal in time—is the character of the new life to be aimed at; and at last perhaps to be achieved. It is only by the humble and difficult mystery of growth that attainment can be possible for us: that growth which runs through all creation, the universal and dynamic expression of the Mind of Christ. New life He asks from us; yes! not from us alone, but from every level of creation—new life in bird and tree and creeping thing, new life breaking from the Seed which He has implanted in the soul. Here—not in any static creed, nor any dream-like mystic revelation—is the fulfilment of all meanings, the filling up of the measure of all glory, the disclosing of the final aim of our living and unresting universe.
Yet not alone shall we accomplish it by the inherent energies of that germ of Divine life within. As the mystery of growth in the little human child seems somewhat upspringing from within, yet is actually dependent on nourishment given from without on a friendly universe that upholds and feeds it—so it is with that little child of the Infinite, the soul. The will stretching to God, growing up towards Him as it seems by the vital quality of its love, and carrying with it the whole personality—this must be fed from without, nourished by the Divine Life incessantly poured in on us, if it is to develop, to survive.
"As the small rain upon the tender grass,
And as the showers upon the herb,"
so is the action of grace upon the growing soul. Grace, then, shall balance growth, and support it: grace, and that vital art of prayer, whereby we appropriate it, opening gates to its inflow, transmuting it into the very substance of our life.
We are not left desolate in this our great adventure. As our bodies in the world of nature, so are our souls immersed and upheld in the world of grace. As the growing tree in the earth, so are we rooted in God. As the flower to the sun, our spirits may open to Him, draw from His infinite strength the power that inspires our growth. “As the shower upon the herb,” His Reality is mysteriously distilled upon us: the heavenly food which nourishes His whole creation and is at once the very Bread of Angels and the sustenance of littlest living things. When man first knows this, then he begins to know his wonder and his littleness: to discern the actuality of his sonship, the mystery and beauty of that Immanent Love which holds him safe within Its arms. “Hereby know we that we abide in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His spirit.”
