Contemplation, costly poverty, and the birth of God in the soul

When a person delights to read or hear about God, that comes from divine grace and is noble entertainment for the soul. To hold God in one's thoughts is sweeter than honey, but to actually sense God is overflowing consolation to the noble soul, and union with God in love is everlasting joy which we taste here to the extent we are ready for it.

Very few are fully ripe for gazing into God's magic mirror. Very few have managed to live the contemplative life at all here on earth. Many begin it but fail to complete it, because they have not rightly lived the life of Martha. As the eagle casts out its young that cannot gaze at the sun, so it goes with the spiritual child.

Whoever wants to build high must lay a firm and strong foundation. The true foundation is the very way and pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ, who himself said: I am the way, the truth and the life.

Dionysius says, The soul shall follow God into the desert of his Godhead, so far as the body here follows Christ in willing outward poverty. But someone objects, That soul is idle. To this St Bernard answers: Waiting on God is not idleness but work that outdoes all other work for someone unskilled in it. To find God we must seek him in his Godhead. Christ says, If father and mother or anything else stand in the way, leave them for good and serve God unhindered. The philosopher says, The soul moved by the power of the Prime Cause needs no counsel from human wisdom. It obeys what is beyond wisdom, for it is moved by the hidden primal truth.

Though we meditate on the blessed works of our Lord's poverty and humility, if we do not want them for ourselves the thoughts are useless. And wanting them is useless too, unless we work hard to find how we may gain them.

We would like to be humble, but not despised. To be despised and rejected is the heritage of virtue. We would like to be poor too, but without lacking anything. And of course we are patient, except with hardships and things we dislike. And so it goes with all the virtues.

Those willingly poor, unconsoled by things that pass away, go down into the valley of humility. They are pursued by insult and hardship, the best school for self-knowledge. And self-knowledge brings knowledge of God.

My children, you who suffer insult, if the world rejects you, join in and reject yourselves along with it. Our Lord Jesus Christ said, The servant is not greater than his master. If the world hated me, know that it hated me before it hated you.

We ought to repay our Lord for all he has done. Plenty will follow our Lord halfway, but not the rest of the way. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it cuts too close when it means giving up themselves.

There are some who neither want nor look for honors, yet when honors come their way, they are affected by them anyway.

St Bernard says: When a soul comes to want what few desire, to be nameless, cast out and disgraced, and welcomes all of it equally, then she reaches peace and the true freedom needed for real vision in the mirror of divinity.

Perfect rest is complete freedom from motion. Our Lord says, Remain in my word and the truth will make you free. Freedom of soul consists in this: finding in herself no sin, tolerating in herself no spiritual imperfection. She is more free the less she holds onto anything that has a name, and the less it holds onto her. She is freest of all when she rises above her own selfhood and flows with all that she is into the bottomless depth of her first origin, into God himself.

Our Lord Jesus Christ urges us to give up all things so that we may be less hindered. St Bernard declares: All the time you do not spend on God is counted as lost to you. And again, The most subtle temptation we can face is to occupy ourselves too much with outward works. Further he says, The best preparation I know for heaven is having no home among outward things.

Our smallest interior act is higher and nobler than our grandest outward one, and yet our highest interior act still falls short before God's unveiled presence in the soul.

The very best work we can do is to prepare for union with the present God and wait for it with fixed intention.

St Paul says, Optimum esse unire deo: Best of all is to be one with God. In this union the soul is dead to all outward acts and also to all inward spiritual acts. God works unhindered, and the soul bears his divine working, yielding to it so completely that God brings forth his only Son in her no less than in himself. This is the atonement in which, in the blink of an eye, the soul becomes more one with God than by doing any act, bodily or spiritual. The more often this birth happens in the soul, the closer her union with God grows.

God is born in the empty soul by showing himself to her in a new form without form, without light in divine light.

St Augustine says, The soul being set aflame with divine love, God is born in the soul, the Holy Ghost being the one who kindles the love.

God has granted divine light to the soul so that he may freely work in his own image.

No creature can do what is not in its power. So the soul cannot act above herself, not even with the gift God has given her as her most exalted faculty. This light, divine as it is, is still created. The creator is one thing and the light another. So God comes to the soul in love, meaning for love to raise her to a higher power, to a function above her own. But love cannot show itself fully unless it meets or makes its match. As far as God finds his likeness in the soul, that far God is at work. If her love is boundless, God acts as boundless love.

A person might live a thousand years and keep growing the whole time in love, just as fire burns as long as there is wood. The bigger the fire and the stronger the wind, the fiercer it burns. Now put love in place of the fire and the Holy Ghost in place of the wind: the greater the love and the stronger the inspiration of the Holy Ghost in grace, the faster the work of perfection is done. Yet not all at once, but through the gradual growth of the soul. It would not be good for the whole person to be consumed at once.

The soul becomes so one with God that grace itself confines her. She is not satisfied with grace, for grace is a created thing. The soul is so strangely caught up that she does not know she exists. She imagines herself to be God, so completely has she gone out of herself. But however far she has gone from herself, she remains a creature. Pouring a drop of water into a vat of wine does not destroy the wine. Seeing herself, the soul sees spirit. Seeing the angels, she again sees spirit. But God is such pure spirit that soul and angel are nearly bodily compared to him. A portrait of the highest seraph painted in black would be a far better likeness than God painted as the highest seraph. That would be an outstanding unlikeness.

Now in the contemplative state we are consumed by fiery love in the Holy Ghost. Sooner than knowingly commit a sin, whether small or grave, we would choose to suffer every martyrdom that can be imagined.

If by one small sin we could release countless souls from hell, we would not do it. This is the love for God a person must have to be at home with him in contemplation. Beyond that, one must have an untroubled mind, and in preparing for it, a quiet, out-of-the-way place is needed. The body should rest from bodily labor, both of the hands and of the tongue and all five senses. The soul stays clearest in quiet, but a tired body often weighs it down with dullness. Then through steady effort we labor in divine love toward intellectual vision until, clearing a path through gathered senses, we rise beyond our own mind to the wonderful wisdom of God, though this is utterly beyond the grasp of any creature. We rise to divine heights. David says: Accedat homo ad cor altum et exaltabitur deus, that is, When a person rises to the summit of the mind, God is exalted. From this divine height we see how low and small creatures are. We feel a trace of the perfection and stability of eternity, for there is neither time nor space there, neither before nor after, only everything present in one new, ever-springing now where a thousand years last no longer than the blink of an eye. And we come to share in the many joys of the heavenly company. So great is the joy of Mary the Queen in heaven that if each member of the heavenly host had only a thousandth part of it, they would taste far more than they have ever earned. There every spirit rejoices in the joy of every other, each tasting it according to his measure. Every heavenly being is, knows, and loves in God, in his own self, and in every other spirit, whether soul or angel. And the shared awareness of one God in three Persons, and the Three who are one God, gives such inexpressible, wondrous satisfaction that every longing is fulfilled. And what they are full of, they go on desiring without end, and what they desire is wholly theirs in new, ever-springing, joyful delight, theirs to enjoy in complete safety from everlasting to everlasting.

After that we press on into the truth, into the simplicity that God is in himself, no longer seeking anything of his. So we fall into a strange wonder. Let us remain in this wonder, for human understanding has no power to get to the bottom of it. Searching the depths of divine wonder only stirs up fresh doubt.