Out of that healing darkness in which the soul was lost on Calvary, there steals upon its vision "like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb," the radiant form of a new transfigured life in which it is to share. Gently that life comes forth from the very heart of Earth our Mother: "not with observation," not with the sudden effulgence of the lightning flashing from east to west, but with the mild unhurried majesty of dawn. "Awake, thou that sleepest, arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." The flooding tide of His Divine life invades the finite thing reborn in Him, filling to the brim the emptied channels of its surrendered selfhood, blessing with a new vitality its every faculty and deed: and suddenly in an ecstasy of joy and wonder it knows itself a veritable "partaker of the Divine Nature," remade in Him, "in another form, another glory, another power."
The soul comes from the dereliction and self-naughting of Calvary—from that unimaginable darkness of mind and loneliness of heart—into the world of the Risen Christ: into that everlasting Easter-fact, the Kingdom of Reality ablaze with God, which here and now awaits us. "And after long woe, suddenly our eyes shall be opened, and in clearness of light our sight shall be full." The Angel who met Mary upon Carmel, Dominus tecum on his lips: the Angel who was with the soul in its agony, and ministered to it of the Chalice of the Will: the Angel who loves and tends all growing, striving things—he comes once more to initiate the Christian into this new, last stage of his long pilgrimage. Very early in the morning, as the blessed night, in quæ terrenis cœlestia, humanis divina junguntur,
| "Wherein are united the earthly and the heavenly; the human and the Divine." (Roman Missal: Office for Holy Saturday: Exultet.) |
fades away, he shall roll back the heavy stone that shut us in that Cave of Illusion, the sepulchre of the earthly imagination. Then we, amazed and exultant, shall come out to see before us a world renewed and yet the same: lit by that new colour known of those who see Creation with the eyes of God. The winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come. The birthpangs of death have done their work. All was then demanded of the soul; its faith, hope, love, fused in one superhuman act of resignation. It gave all, and gladly since He asked it; stripped-itself of everything but pain. Now all is restored, full measure and pressed down. Because it gave its life to Him it shall now receive the mighty dower of His vitality. Because it was not afraid to enter His darkness, lit only by the faint lantern of humble and self-giving love, now it is inundated with the Uncreated Light. As it believed, it poured out for Him its very life-blood: and lo! there is ichor in its veins. Joy it renounced for Him; and now it is filled with a wild happiness, the mighty exultation of the Sons of God.
For every soul that follows in His footsteps, that elects the heroic vocation of surrender—the scourge, the rosy crown, the heavy cross—the Easter Garden waits at the end of sorrows, fragrant with unimaginable perfumes, and made lovely with the simplest growing things. Here and now, it stretches out beyond our earthy sepulchre, athwart the teeming streets and huddled houses that seem to shut us from the light. Christ walks in it: and behold! not all the cohorts of His Father’s angels mark His presence, but hedge and coppice breaking into flower. Suddenly from the tomb where our separated life was laid away, we shall come out into that world, so real and so supernal. Shy and astonished, we shall move with tentative footsteps upon its kindly turf.
"I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the House of the Lord." Green-meshed are the airy vaults of it, and violet-blue its cool and shaded floor. The innocent furred acolytes of His Mysteries go without fear between its aisles; the birds and angels sit together in its trees. A Gardener moves between those borders, and blossoms spring between His wounded feet. New life He radiates, and not alone on human spirits. All Creation waits upon His coming; and where He passes by He brings it peace.
Here at last His veritable encounter is made possible to us: here the deepest secrets of His Love are declared to us under the simplest accidents of natural life. "My beloved is mine, and I am His: He feedeth among the lilies." As the veil that hangs before the Tabernacle, so do these dew-drenched branches, so does this heavenly inflorescence, shroud the gateway to the Garden of His joy. "My secret to myself: once more for a space the soul is alone with it; alone with the whispered messages of morning, the hushed ecstasies of life. Only the radiant wounds that bless its members remind it of the torments of the past. "In the House of its Friend" it received them. This at last it knows, and knowing, does not seek to understand: for now it is "one thing with Him," buried with Him, risen with Him—at last its life is hidden with Christ in God. Human love comes to meet it; but in this rapt and sacred hour the soul must cry, "Touch me not," for another contact is about its limbs. God enfolds it as an atmosphere: it stands on earth, and yet it lives in heaven.
What, then, is it to mean for us, this Resurrection-life of the transfigured soul, remade upon the levels of Reality? What did it mean for our Master, in the matchless hour of His return, when He walked the solitary garden and communed with its still and fragrant life? It meant a coming back to earth of that deified spirit which was caught into the arms of God in its utmost surrender: a deliberate reversion, in the fullness of its power, in the ardour of its burning charity, to the plane of the shadowy, the imperfect, the unreal. It meant the beginning of the Eternal Return which the Holy Eucharist makes actual to us; a self-spending, a giving of Himself under the humblest limitations, that He may be food for the very life of men. This it is that makes us certain of the perfection of Christ’s union with the Father—not His ineffable immersion in that Divine Reality, but His sweet and steady care for littlest human interests, the undistorted love which led Him to transfigure with His presence the poor diurnal life of common things. He does not disdain to entice with gentlest intimacies our reluctant faith and trust. He comes into our midst and shows to us the wounds on His creative hands, His untiring feet; even the way that leads to His sacred heart. We find Him in the solitary mountain. He stands among us on the shore. He is a Guest at our table, and ministers to us the hidden manna, the very substance of His life. He accepts even the fruits of our poor labours—gentlest of all the courtesies of God. Not for His own sake, but for the sake of humanity He returns to us; returns to the patient earth, His mother and ours. There in the early morning He comes to meet us, bearing that banner of our redemption which is the ensign of His triumph and our hope; proof that the Pathfinder has found a way. There He nests in the heart of life and waits our search of Him, waits till he can again come to birth in the arid and reluctant human soul.
"Tell us where the Lord sojourneth,
For we find an empty tomb.
Whence He sprung, there He returneth,
Mystic Sun, the Virgin’s womb.
Hidden Sun, His beams so near us,
Cloud-empillared as He was,
From of old there He, Ischyros,
Waits our search, Athanatos."
It is the dearest ambition of the Christian, the final evidence of consecrated love, that the Easter-fact may be manifest in him also, even under the veils and limitations of the flesh. He too would live in the interests of humanity the transfigured life in the here-and-now. Since there dwells in his heart the very presence of the Strong and the Immortal, he desires that this strength and immortality may be his own, to spend for other men.
Surely here the desire of man encounters the desire of God which runs to meet it. From the Easter-fact, transcendent life is indeed poured out on us, to take and make our own and spend again. It streams upon us from the altar: it meets us in the silence of the hills; it buds mysteriously within the soul. Yet not for our own sakes is it given us; rather that we may follow in the steps of our Pattern, and go back to entincture with new gold the desirous world of men. For love’s sake we shall return to them, in their midst our true, completed life shall be manifest; here, not in some far-off region of the "spiritual," begin the triumphant mysteries of His Grace. "Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south, blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out." They shall flow out into the sad and sterile tracts of earth, to heal, to fertilise, to make fragrant, giving news of the secret place from which they come: the heavenly garden, everywhere awaiting us, where Love and Wisdom meet in the heart of the Living God.
