The eternal birth: finding God in the ground of the soul

Et cum factus esset Jesus annorum duodecim, etc. (Luke 2): And when Jesus was twelve years old, etc. We read in the gospel that when our Lord was twelve years old, he went with Joseph and Mary to Jerusalem, into the temple. When they left, Jesus stayed behind in the temple without their knowing it. When they got home and missed him, they looked for him among people they knew and among strangers, among their relatives and in the crowd, and did not find him. They had lost him in the crowd. So there was nothing to do but go back the way they had come, and when they got back to where they started, into the temple, there they found him.

If you want to find this noble birth, you must truly leave the crowd and go back to the starting point, into the ground you came from. The powers of the soul and their workings, these are the crowd: memory, understanding and will all scatter you into many things, so you must leave them all behind: sense perception, imagination, and everything in which you find yourself and keep yourself in view. After that you may find this birth, but believe me, not otherwise. He has never been found among friends, nor among relatives, nor among acquaintances. There, rather, one loses him altogether.

Now the question arises whether this birth can be found in anything that, though it relates to God, is still taken in from outside through the senses, in any picture of God as good, or wise, or compassionate, or in whatever the intellect can conceive about divinity. Can this birth be found in anything of that kind? In truth, no. For although these things are good and godlike, they still come in from outside through the senses. Everything must well up from within, out of God, if this birth is to shine with a truly clear light, and your own work must be set aside, with every faculty serving his purposes and not your own. If this work is to be done, God alone must do it, and you must simply undergo it. Where you truly go out from your own willing and knowing, God surely and willingly goes in with his knowing and shines there clearly. Where God thus knows himself, your knowledge is of no use and cannot stand. Do not imagine, however fondly, that your reason can grow into the knowledge of God. No natural light can help bring it about that God shines in you in a godly way. It must be utterly put out and go altogether out of itself, and then God can shine in with his light, bringing back with him everything you went out of, and a thousand times more, along with the new form that holds it all.

We have an image of this in the gospel. When our Lord had spoken so kindly with the Gentile woman at the well, she left her water jar there and ran to the town to tell her people that the true Messiah had come. The people did not believe her report, so they went out with her to see him for themselves. Then they said to her, 'Now we believe, for we have seen him ourselves.' In truth, neither by any created knowledge nor by your own wisdom can you be brought to know God in a godly way. To know God the way God knows, your knowledge must turn into a plain unknowing, into a forgetting of yourself and every creature.

Now perhaps you will say: Tell me, sir, what good is my intellect if it must be inert and completely idle? Is it my best course to raise my mind to this unknowing knowing, which plainly cannot be anything? For if I knew something, it would not be ignorance, and I would not be idle and empty. Must I stay in total darkness?

Yes, truly. You can do no better than to make your home in total darkness and ignorance.

Alas, sir, must everything go then, and is there no way back?

No, truly. By rights there is no way back.

But what is this darkness? What does it mean, what is its name?

It can only be called a potential receptiveness, which is nevertheless not altogether lacking in real being, or in need of it: the merely potential state in which you will be made complete. So there is no way back from it. If you turn back, it is not because of any truth, it is because of the senses, the world or the devil. And by persisting in this turning back you inevitably fall into sin, and you risk slipping so far as to have the eternal fall. So there is no turning back, only a pressing forward, following this possibility through to its fulfillment. It never rests until it is filled with all being. Just as matter never rests until it is filled with every possible form, so the intellect never rests until it is filled to the full extent of its capacity.

On this a pagan master says: 'Nature has nothing swifter than the heavens, which surpass everything else in swiftness.' But the mind of man surely outstrips them. Provided it keeps its vigor and is not degraded or torn apart by what is base and coarse, it can outstrip the high heavens and need not slacken until it reaches the summit, where it is fed and cherished by the highest good, by God himself.

How worthwhile it is, then, to take hold of this possibility. By keeping yourself empty and bare, simply tracking and following and giving yourself up to this darkness and ignorance without turning back, you may indeed win that which is all things. And the more you are stripped of yourself and ignorant of things, the nearer you are to it. Of this bareness it is written in Hosea: 'I will lead my friend into the desert and speak to her heart.' The true Word of eternity is spoken only in eternity, where man is a desert and a stranger to himself and to multiplicity. The prophet longed for this desolate estrangement from self, saying: 'Who will give me the wings of a dove, that I may fly away and be at rest!' Where shall I find peace and rest? Truly, in rejection, in desolation and estrangement from all creatures. That is why David says: 'I would rather be an outcast in the house of my God than have honor and riches in the tents of sinners.'

Now perhaps you will say: Alas, sir, must a person really be stripped bare and made a stranger to everything, outward and inward? Must the powers and their workings all go? It seems a hard thing for a person to be left this way by God without any support, for God to add to his misery like this, neither giving light nor encouragement nor working in him, since that is what your teaching amounts to. For someone in such complete nothingness, would it not be better to be doing something to ease the gloom and desolation, to pray or read or go to church, or else find something useful to occupy himself with?

No, be sure of this: complete stillness, complete idleness, is best of all. Know that you cannot exchange this state for any other without harm. You would gladly do part of the preparing yourself and let God do the rest, but it cannot work that way. However quick you are to think of this readiness and want it, God is always there before you. But even granting what is actually impossible, that the preparation for this work or this pouring-in is shared between him and you, know this: God is bound to act, to pour himself out into you, the moment he finds you ready. God differs from a human carpenter, who works or does not work as he pleases, who can do a thing or leave it undone at will. Finding you ready, he is obliged to act, to overflow into you, just as the sun must burst forth when the air is bright and clear and cannot hold itself back. Truly it would be a serious failing in God if, finding you so empty and so bare, he did not work some excellent work in you, or fill you with glorious gifts.

In the same way philosophers say that the moment the material for a child is ready in the mother's womb, God pours into the body its living spirit, that is, the soul, the form of the body. The being-ready and the pouring-in happen in a single flash. When nature reaches her summit, God gives his grace: the instant the spirit is ready, God enters without hesitation or delay. It is written in the book of Revelation that our Lord offers himself to men: 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock, waiting for someone to let me in, and I will eat with him.' You need not seek him here or there, he is no further off than the door of your heart. There he stands waiting for whoever is ready to open and let him in. You need not call to him from far away, he waits far more impatiently than you do for you to open to him. He longs for you a thousand times more urgently than you long for him. The opening and the entering are one point.

You will perhaps say: How can that be? I have no sense of him at all. Know that finding him is not within your power, but within his. He reveals himself when he chooses, and he hides himself too when he chooses. This is what Christ meant when he said to Nicodemus, 'The spirit blows where it wills, you hear its voice but do not know where it comes from or where it goes.' This sounds like a contradiction: you hear but do not know. By hearing, we know. Christ meant that through hearing it is taken in and absorbed, as if to say: you receive it without being aware of it. For know this, God cannot leave anything empty and unfilled. Nature's God cannot bear for anything to be empty or void. So if it seems to you that you cannot find him, and that you are completely empty of him, that is still not the case. For if there were any emptiness anywhere under heaven, whatever it might be, great or small, the heavens would either draw it up to themselves, or bend down and fill it with themselves. God, the lord of nature, does not allow anything whatsoever to remain empty. So stand still and do not waver, in case by turning away from God now, for just a moment, you never turn back to him again.

Perhaps you will say: Well, sir, since you keep assuming that someday this birth will happen in me, that the Son will be born in me, can I have some sign by which I will recognize that it has taken place?

Yes, truly. There would be three signs. I will tell you one of them. I am often asked whether it is possible to reach a point where nothing in time can hinder you, neither multiplicity nor matter. Indeed it is. If this birth really happens, no creature can hinder you, everything points you toward God and toward this birth. We find an image of this in lightning. Whatever it strikes, whether tree, animal or person, it turns toward itself in the shock. A person with his back to it instantly spins around to face it, and all the thousand leaves of a tree turn over to meet the stroke. So it is with everyone this birth happens to, they are at once turned toward this birth by everything present, however earthly it may be. In fact, what was once a hindrance now becomes nothing but a help. Your face is turned so fully toward this birth that no matter what you see or hear, you receive nothing but this birth in everything. All things simply become God to you, because you see only God in all things. It is like someone who has looked long at the sun and then meets the sun again in whatever he looks at afterward. If this is missing, this looking for and seeing God in everything without exception, then you are missing this birth.

You may ask: should someone in this condition still practice penance? Does he lose anything by giving up penitential exercises?

Penitential practices, among other things, were set up for a particular purpose. Fasting, keeping vigil, praying, kneeling, scourging, wearing hair shirts, sleeping on hard ground, or whatever else it may be, were all devised because body and flesh always stand opposed to spirit. The body is far too strong for the spirit, so there is always a battle joined between them, a conflict without end. Here the body is bold and strong, because here it is at home. The world helps it, the earth is its homeland, it is supported by all its own kind: food, drink, comfort, all of it stands against the spirit. The spirit is a stranger here, its kindred and its whole people are in heaven, there its loved ones live. To help the spirit in its distress, and to hold the flesh back somewhat in this struggle so that it does not conquer the spirit, we put on it the bridle of penitential practices, to curb it so that the spirit can control it. This is done to bring it under control, but to conquer it and curb it

A thousand times better, put on it the bridle of love. With love you overcome it most surely, with love you load it most heavily. God lies in wait for us therefore with nothing so much as with love. For love is like the fisherman's hook. No fish falls to the fisherman that is not caught on his hook. Once it takes the hook the fish belongs to the fisherman; in vain it twists this way and that, the fisherman is certain of his catch. And so I say of love: he who is caught by it has the strongest of all bonds and yet a pleasant burden. He who carries this sweet burden goes further, gets nearer by it than by using any harshness a person is capable of. What is more, he can cheerfully put up with whatever happens to him, cheerfully suffer whatever God sends. Nothing makes you so much God's, nor God so much your own, as this sweet bond. He who has found this way will look for no other. He who hangs on this hook is caught so fast that foot and hand, mouth, eyes and heart and everything that belongs to a person is bound to become God's.

So then you cannot, better than by love, overcome your enemy and stop him doing you harm. This is why it is written: 'Love is strong as death and hard as hell.' Death separates soul from body, but love separates all things from the soul; she will not put up with, at any cost, whatever is not God or God's. Whoever is caught in this net, whoever walks in this way, whatever he does is done by love, and the work belongs to love alone: busy or idle, it makes no difference. Such a person's smallest action is more worthwhile, his humblest task is more fruitful for himself and for others, and more pleasing to God, than the combined works of other people who, though free of mortal sin, are still beneath him in love. He rests to more purpose than others labor.

Wait, then, for this book, so that you may be happily caught, and the more surely you are caught the more surely you will be set free.

That we may be caught and set free in this way, help us, you who are love itself. Amen.