The promise of the Father and the life that asks no why

Convescens praecepit eis ab Jerosolymis ne discederent etc. (Acts 1:4), meaning: eating together with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem. This passage, which I have quoted in Latin, comes in the Mass for today. St Luke records how our Lord, about to depart to heaven, was with his disciples, whom he commanded not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father, which they had heard from his mouth, for they would be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

He speaks of the promise or pledge of the Father. This same pledge was given to us too: baptism in the Holy Spirit, and through it being brought to live above time, in eternity. The Holy Spirit is not given in the things of time. When a person turns away from temporal things and goes into himself, he notices a heavenly light, a light that comes down from heaven. Though it descends from heaven, it remains under heaven. There is no lasting satisfaction in this light, for it is mortal, some say it is a kind of matter. Now iron, which by nature falls, will rise against its own nature and hang suspended from a lodestone, by the power the stone itself receives from heaven. Wherever the stone turns, the iron goes with it. In the same way, the mind, unsatisfied with this lower light, will climb the sky and search the heavens to find the breath that turns them, the heavens whose turning makes everything on earth grow and flourish. Its spirit never rests content until it breaks through to the coil, to the first origin where that breath has its source. This spirit knows no time and no number: number does not exist apart from the sickness of time. It has no root anywhere except in eternity, where there is no number but one. This spirit, going beyond number, breaks through multiplicity and is pierced through by God, and because he pierces me, I pierce him back: God leads this spirit into the desert, into the solitude of its own self, where it is simply one and wells up within itself. This spirit has no why, for if it had a why, the oneness itself would also have a why. This spirit is in oneness and freedom.

Theologians say this will is free in that nothing can bind it except God alone. God does not bind the will, he sets it free, free to choose nothing but God himself, and this is true freedom. For the spirit to be unable to will anything other than God's will is not its bondage but its real liberation. Some people say: if I have God and the love of God, then I am free to follow my own will. They are mistaken. As long as you are capable of anything against the will of God and against his law, you do not have the love of God, even if you deceive the world into thinking you do. Whoever is in God's will and God's love is glad to do what God likes and leave undone what God hates, and he can no more leave undone a thing that God wants done than he can do a thing that God hates, just like a man whose legs are tied together: he cannot wander off, and neither can anyone go wrong who is in the will of God. Someone once said: God might command me to do evil and avoid virtue, but I am incapable of sin. No one loves virtue without being virtue. Whoever gives up himself and everything, who does not seek his own in any way but does everything he does for love and without why, that man, being dead to the whole world, is alive in God and God in him.

Here someone might object: it is all very well for you to tell us these things, but we ourselves know nothing of them. That I regret too. This knowledge is so noble and so ordinary that it cannot be bought for a farthing or a penny. A just mind and a free will, have only these, and it is yours. To let go of all things on this lower plane, where they exist in mortal form, is to recover them in God, where they are real. Everything that is dead here is alive there, and everything that is dense matter here is spirit there in God. If you pour fresh water into a clean basin, and everything is clear and bright, and set it in a quiet place, then, bending your face over it, you see it at the bottom just as it really is. That is because the water is free of impurity and still. It is the same with people who, in a state of freedom and inner calm, see God in peace and quiet, and when they can see him just as well in turmoil and disorder, that is perfect evenness of mind; but if a person has less of him in trouble and unrest, that shows he is not even-minded, that he is not just. St Augustine says: when the days are weary and the time feels long, a person should turn to God, where nothing is long and all things are at rest. The lover of justice is possessed by justice, and he is this virtue himself.

Our Lord said: I have not called you servants, I have called you friends, for the servant does not know what his lord does. And so a friend of mine may know something I do not, yet not care to tell me. But our Lord says: all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. I am amazed how some priests, even ones who claim to be learned and important, let themselves be misled into reading these words to mean that he shows us only the bare minimum of the path needed for our happiness. That is not what I think, and there is no truth in it. Why was God born man? So that I might be born God myself. God died so that I might die to the whole world and all created things. And it is in this sense that we must understand our Lord's saying: all that I have heard from my Father I have revealed to you. What does the Son hear from his Father? The Father can only beget, the Son can only be begotten. All that the Father has and all that he is, the whole ground of God's essence and God's nature, he brings forth once and for all in his only-begotten Son. This is what the Son hears from his Father, this he makes known to us, since we are this same Son. All that the Son has, he has from his Father: essence and nature, we are this only Son. No one has the Holy Spirit except the one who is the only Son. Father and Son breathe out their holy Breath, and once this sacred breath breathes into a person it stays with him, for he is of its essence and its spirit.

It is true you may receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, a likeness of the Holy Spirit, but it does not stay with you, it does not last. Just as a person may blush with shame or go pale, it is a passing accident. But someone who is fair and ruddy by nature is always so. It is the same with this man: since he is the only Son, the holy Breath belongs to his very nature. As it is written in the Book of Wisdom: this day I have begotten you in the reflection of my eternal light, in the fullness of the Godhead and the glory of all the saints. He is begetting him now, today. There is a childbed in the Godhead, there people are baptized in the Holy Spirit according to the promise of the Father. After these days, which are not many, or just a few, then comes the fullness of the Godhead, where there is neither day nor night, where things a thousand miles away are as close to me as the ground I stand on. That is fulfilment, the full enjoyment of Godhood, that is oneness. As long as the soul sees any difference, she is not just; as long as anything looks out or looks in, there is no true oneness. Mary Magdalene sought our Lord inside the tomb; looking for one dead man, she found two living angels, but she was still not comforted. The angel said: why are you so cast down? Whom are you seeking, woman? As if to say: you are looking for one dead man and have found two living ones. She might have answered: that is exactly my complaint, that I find two where I was looking for one alone.

As long as anything created can leave a clear mark on the soul, she is not at peace. I say, as I have often said before, that as far as the soul's created nature goes, there is no such thing as truth there. I say there is something beyond the soul's created nature. But certain priests cannot understand how there could be anything so close to God, so much like him. It has nothing in common with nothing. Anything made or created is nothing, but this is foreign and far removed from what is made and created. It is something complete in itself, taking nothing from outside. Our Lord went up to heaven, beyond all light, beyond all understanding, beyond anything human beings can grasp. Whoever is carried beyond light of any kind in this way dwells in oneness. As St Paul says: God dwells in light that no one can approach, which is in itself the perfect one. A person, then, must be dead, truly dead, empty of any being of his own, without any likeness, like no one, in order to be truly Godlike. For it is God's nature, his very character, to have no equal, to be beyond comparison. May we be the same in the oneness of God himself. So help us God. Amen.