Every good gift: on the gift that comes from above

Omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum descendit a patre luminum (James 1:17). My Latin quotation is from the Epistle of St James. He says, every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above from the Father of lights. With him there is no variableness nor shadow of time (or, temporal reflection). He uses these two terms, good gift and perfect gift, and they refer to different things, so our masters tell us. A datum happens in time; a donum has no thought of time. A datum is a matter of self-seeking, but a donum is free and unconditioned and wholly without why. A perfect gift is one that shows nothing but good will. The perfect gift is therefore free and unconditional. The perfect gift is a friendly offering, essentially a giving even though not bestowed. According to our masters, gifts are perfect to the degree that they carry love; but good gifts are like hucksters and always have their price. In the words of one of the saints, the blood of the Holy Spirit and its glow is in one sense eternal and in another temporal. If my face were eternal and were held before a mirror, it would be received in the mirror as a temporal thing even though it is eternal in itself. The Holy Spirit has its glow. The eternal glow of its eternal blood is the perfect gift; when the soul is worthy and receives it, it turns into the good gift. What this means is that this gift, which is temporal in us, is in itself eternal. God wants to give us his good gift; he is also ready to give us his perfect gift as well, namely the Holy Spirit itself. Hence his words, every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above from the Father of lights.

From another angle he means, it seems to me, that the Holy Spirit is the perfect gift only as it works in the intellect. As it proceeds into the practice of good works, even godly ones, or even into thought, it becomes the good gift. It is the perfect gift so far as the soul lives in God, remains in the light and savor of God, hanging motionless in his perfect light-nature. As St Paul says, you shall taste the things that are above. The Holy Spirit is the Gift in which you remain in the perfection of light. The soul suspended in pure intellectual light is enjoying the things that are above. Our masters teach that bodily things are called matter. We say the light of intellect avoids matter, but even though in itself it is wholly without things, it still has potential, and that potential is for matter. He says, taste the things that are above, not, that are above the earth. We have a saying: the farther from matter, the purer the intelligence. When in the light the grey tint of the cloth strikes my eye, I see it. If it were intellect I would see nothing. We recognize another power as being far removed from matter. How so? Suppose I saw a man twenty years ago. He may now be dead, but I still have a likeness of his form as though he stood before my eyes. This power needs no matter, but it has the imperfection of receiving from matter, that is to say, in forms. By contrast, the light, intelligence, goes beyond what is already matter or is potentially matter. While the soul remains in God, suspended in his intellectual light, it has no material objectivity nor likeness nor potential. He says, every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above from the Father of lights.

What does he mean by calling it a good gift? Between those things whose being and doing are in eternity and the things whose being and doing are in time, there must be some middle term. He means that it is God, this thing whose being and doing is the perfect gift; so the being and doing of the perfect gift is in eternity. But the being and doing of the good gift are in time, which must mean that the soul is on the way to eternal life. Why does he promise both good and perfect gifts? When God gives the Holy Spirit itself, whose being and activity is in eternity, that is his perfect gift which, showing itself in thought, is his good gift.

St Augustine says, and the masters too, that the soul has some capacity that is open toward God, into which he alone can speak, whereas a creature speaks into another part. Into this highest power, which only God addresses, he speaks wisdom, which is his perfect gift. But the other part, the one creatures speak to, is satisfied with reason. The same gift is perfect, being beyond time, and good, as it perfects the things of time. What is temporal in us is eternal in God. The datum in us is donum in God. What is mixed and temporal and good in us becomes, if we follow it to its source, perfect in God. What we are able to receive of him is infinitely small compared to what he is. Whatever else one may know, one does not know God.

He says, he comes down from on high from the Father of lights. What does he mean? The Son and the Holy Spirit have one source in the Father, and the Holy Spirit and the Son are one light, and they are both lights. God is the Father of lights. St Augustine tells what the soul is tasting in God. He explains that in that food the tongue is tasting the invisible light; he says the soul is not a thing of sensible appetites and pleasures; it has a hidden energy and brightness.

According to the masters, the angels are a light: God is the entire light, with whom there is no change nor time nor turning. The nobler the creature, the closer it is to God. All creaturely being and doing is in time. But the angels, who are higher, are in essence beyond time and without change in themselves. Their usual activities in God are free of time, but in that they look downward they carry an aspect, or shadow, of time. But in none of his works does God have any shadow of time or change. So far as there is no changing, no shadow, in a person, so far that person compares with divinity. A creature always has this and that, one thing and another; but in God there is neither this nor that, neither one nor the other; and unless there is in us what two and two are, what one plus another is, what happens within us remains simply good and bad. There is no one or other with the Father of lights. May we be given every good gift and every perfect gift, by which we are lifted above time to the Father of lights, with whom there is no variableness nor temporal nature. So help us God. Amen.

EVERY GOOD GIFT

Omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum de sursum est descendens a patre luminum (James 1:17). St James says in his epistle, every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above from the Father of lights.

Now you must know that for people who give themselves over to God and diligently seek to do his will, whatever God sends them will be the best. As God lives, be sure it is the very best, and there can be no better way. Some other way may seem better, yet it is not better for you; God wills this way and not that, so this way is bound to be the best. Sickness or poverty, hunger or thirst, whatever God does give you or does not give you, that is the very best for you, yes, even if it is fervor or the interior life which, alas, you lack. Whatever you have or do not have, accept it all for the glory of God, and then whatever he sends you will be for the best.

Perhaps you will say, how can I tell whether it is God's will or not? If it were not God's will, it would not be. You have neither sickness nor anything else except that God wills it. And so, knowing it to be God's will, you ought to rejoice in it and be so content with it that any pain loses its sting for you; indeed, even in the worst pain, to feel the least affliction or distress would be altogether wrong. Accept it from God as the best, since it is bound to be the best thing for you. It belongs to his very nature to will what is best. So let me will it too; there is nothing that should please me better. Suppose there was someone I tried hard to please, and I knew for certain that he liked me in a grey coat more than any other. That coat would please me too, and I would prefer it to any of the others, however nice they were. Given my wish to please a certain person, the things I know he wishes, in word and deed, are the things I would do, and those alone. Judge for yourselves then of your love. If you truly love God you will like nothing better than what best lets him work his will in us, however great the pain or privation seems.

Unless you take as much delight in it as you do in ease and plenty, something is wrong.

One thing I am in the habit of saying, and it is true, is that every day we cry in the Our Father, Lord, thy will be done, and then when his will is done we grumble and are unhappy about it. Whatever he does, let us consider it the best and like it best of all. Those who do take it as the best always stay at peace. Sometimes you will say, alas, it would have been better if something else had happened, or, if that had not happened, things would have turned out better. As long as you think this way you will never be at peace. Accept it all as the best. That is the first lesson of our text.

There is another meaning, mark it well. He says every gift. The very best and the very highest things are innate gifts, and in him the most innate of all. God gives nothing so gladly as great gifts. Once in this very place I said, God likes forgiving big sins more than small ones. The bigger they are, the gladder he is and the quicker to forgive them. It is the same with graces, gifts, and virtues: the greater they are, the greater his pleasure in giving them, for giving freely is his nature. The bigger and better the things, the more you shall get. The noblest creatures are the angels, who are minds and nothing else; they have no carnal nature, and they are infinitely more in number than all corporal things.

Once I laid it down that for a thing to be properly expressed it must proceed from within, moved by its own form: it must come not in from outside but out from within. It truly lives in the depths of the soul. There, all things are present to you, alive and active in their own right, at their peak, in their prime. Why are you unaware of it? Because you are not at home. The more noble a thing is, the more common it is. I have feeling in common with the animals and life in common with the trees. Being is even more innate in me, and that I have in common with all creatures. The heavens exceed all neighboring things, and are nobler too. The nobler a thing, the bigger it is and the more universal. Love is as noble as it is universal. It does seem hard, as our Lord commands, to love our fellow Christians as ourselves. The unenlightened say that we ought to love them just as they love themselves. Not so. We ought to love them no more than our own selves, which is not difficult. If you consider it, this is matter for reward more than a command. The command seems hard, but the reward is desirable. The one who loves God as he ought and must, whether he wants to or not, and as all creatures love him, will love his fellow Christian as himself, rejoicing in his joys and hoping for his honor as much as his own, and treating the other as himself. By this he is always happy, whether in honor or in need, just as though he were in heaven, and indeed has more enjoyment than the happiness of himself alone.

The plain truth is that it is wrong for you to hold your own honor dearer than another's. Remember, if you seek anything of your own, you will never find God, for you are not seeking God alone. You are seeking something with God, making a candle of God, as it were, to find something by, and then, having found it, throwing the candle away. This is how it will go for you: whatever you find with God is nothing, whatever it may be, whether profit or wages or the interior life or anything else. You seek nothing and you will find nothing. You will find nothing because it is nothing that you seek, that is all. All creatures are a mere nothing. I do not say they are small, that they are something: they are absolutely nothing. A thing without being is not, or is nothing. Creatures have no real being, for their being consists in the presence of God. If God turned away for an instant they would all perish. I have sometimes said, and it is true, that whoever has gotten the whole world plus God has gotten no more than God alone. Having all creatures without God is no more than having one fly without God, exactly the same, no more and no less.

This is a true saying. The man who gives a thousand marks of gold for the building of convents or churches is doing a great deed. But the one who gives a thousand marks for nothing gives far more; he is doing far more than the other. When God created all creatures he could not move in them, they were so small and narrow. But the soul he made so like himself, so nearly his own equal, on purpose to give himself to her: nothing else that he could give her would she care for in the least. God must give me himself as my own, as he is his own, or I get nothing, nor does anything else suit my taste. Whoever receives him outright like this must have wholly renounced self and gone out of self; such a person gets straight from God everything God has, as fully his own as it is God's own, and our Lady too and all who dwell in heaven. All this belongs rightly to this person. Those who have renounced themselves, and in this sense are dead to themselves, receive the same, no less.

Thirdly, the phrase 'Father of lights.' The word father implies to us a son. Father stands for generation in the abstract, and is an expression for the universal principle of life. The Father generates his Son in his eternal intellect, and the Father generates his Son in the soul just as he does in his own nature; he bears his Son in the soul as her own, and his existence depends on bringing his Son to birth in the soul, whether he would or not. Once I was asked what the Father is doing in heaven. I said: he is begetting his Son, an act he delights in so much and that pleases him so well that he does nothing else but generate his Son, and these two flower together with the Holy Spirit. When the Father gives birth to his Son in me, I am that very Son and no other: we are other in our humanity, true, but there I am the Son himself and no other. As sons we are lawful heirs. Whoever knows the truth knows this well. The word father means simply begetting and having sons. We are sons in his Son and are the Son himself.

Now consider the words, 'they come from above.' I said this is exactly what I mean. Whoever wants to receive from above must be below in true humility. Know for certain, if a thing is not rightly underneath it receives nothing and conceives nothing, not a single thing however small. If you have an eye to your own self or to any thing or person, then you are not rightly under, and you receive nothing; but once brought rightly under, you receive everything at once and in full. It is God's nature to give, and his existence depends on giving to us when we are under him. If we are not, then we get nothing: we do him violence and kill him. Or if we cannot do that to him, we do it to ourselves as far as it lies in us. If you would truly give him everything, see that you put yourself rightly and humbly under God, raising up God in your heart and in your understanding. The Father sent his Son into the world in the fullness of the soul's time, when she had finished with time. When the soul is free of time and place, the Father sends his Son into the soul. This is the meaning of the words, 'the best gifts come from above, from the Father of lights.' Let us be ready to receive these same best gifts. So help us God the Father of lights.