The castle of the soul: virgin and wife

Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum et mulier quaedam excepit illum etc. (Luke 10). I quote first in Latin this text from the gospel. The translation reads: "Our Lord Jesus Christ went up into a certain fastness and was received by a certain virgin who was a wife."

Mark the term. It must be a virgin by whom Jesus is received. Virgin means, in other words, a person free of alien images, as free as he was when he did not yet exist. It may be asked: a person born and launched on rational life, how can he be as free of images as he was when he was not, since he knows a variety of things, and all of them are images: how can he possibly be void of them?

I answer this way: if I were intelligent enough to hold within me, intellectually, the sum of all the forms conceived by man and subsisting in God himself, having no property in them and no sense of ownership, positive or negative, past or future, but standing in the present now, perfectly free in the will of God and doing it without ceasing, then truly I would be a virgin, unhandicapped by forms, just as I was when I was not.

Further, I hold that being a virgin does not deprive a person at all of the works he has done. He is untrammeled, virgin-free of them in the highest truths, just as Jesus is wholly free and virgin in himself. According to the masters, likeness, and likeness alone, is the cause of union, so a person must be maiden, virgin, to receive the virgin Jesus.

Now take this to heart: the ever virgin is never fruitful. To be fruitful the soul must be wife. Spouse is the noblest title of the soul, nobler than virgin. For a person to receive God within him is good, and in receiving he is virgin. But for God to be fruitful in him is still better. The fruit of this gift is gratitude for it, and in this newborn thankfulness the spirit is the spouse bearing Jesus back into his Father's heart.

Many good gifts received in maidenhood are not brought to birth in wifely fruitfulness, reborn in praise and thanks to God. Such gifts decay and come to nothing, and the person is no better and no happier for them. His virginity is useless in this case, because to his virginity he does not add the perfect fruitfulness of wife. That is the trouble. This is why my text says: Jesus went up into a certain fastness and was received by a certain maid who was a wife. It must be so, as I have said.

Married people yield little more than one fruit a year. But it is other married people I have in mind now: those whose hearts are wedded to praying, fasting, vigils, or other outward discipline and mortification of the flesh. A fondness for this sort of thing, which costs a person the freedom to wait instantly on God in the here and now and follow him alone in the light where he would show you, moment by moment, fresh and clear, what to do and what to leave undone, as though you had nothing else and would and could want nothing else: any such leaning or preoccupation that steadily robs you of this freedom I call here a year, and your soul bears no fruit until she is finished with this work of your affection, nor do you have any trust in God or in yourself until you are done with your fondness, in other words, you have no peace. There is no fruit until your own work is finished. I count this a year, and a poor one at that, its yield coming from affection and not from freedom. These people I call married, yoked to their affections. Their harvest is small and stunted besides, I say, in God's sight.

The virgin wife, free and unbound in her affections, is always as near to God as she is to herself. She is rich in fruit, and great in it, no more and no less than God is himself. This fruit, his birth, is what the virgin who is a wife bears. Daily she yields her hundredfold and her thousandfold, indeed her labors and her fruits are beyond counting, in that most noble ground, the very ground, to put it plainly, where the Father is begetting his eternal Word. There she is heavy with fruit. For Jesus, the light and splendor of the paternal heart (according to St Paul he is the light and splendor of the Father's heart), this Jesus is made one with her and she with him, she shines with him and is radiant as one, one pure bright light in the paternal heart.

Elsewhere I have said that there is a power in the soul untouched by time and flesh, flowing from the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, wholly spiritual. In this power is God, forever green, flowering in all the joy and glory of his very self. Such dear delight, such unimaginable deep joy as no one can fully tell, for in this power the eternal Father is begetting his eternal Son without pause, the power being heavy with child, the Father's Son and at the same time its own self this very Son, within the unique power of the Father. Suppose a man were an absolute monarch, sole owner of all earthly goods, and suppose he gave it all up for God and became the poorest of the poor, and that God on top of this laid on him as heavy a burden as he ever laid on any mortal, which he bore to his death, and then God granted him one brief glimpse of his being in this power: so great would be his joy that poverty and suffering would be wiped away. Indeed, even if God gave him no taste of heaven but this, he would still have the full reward of his suffering, for God himself is in this power as in the eternal now. If a person's spirit were always joined to God in this same power, he could not age.

SERMONS AND COLLATIONS

For the now in which God made the first man, and the now in which the last man will vanish, and the now I am speaking in, all are the same in God, where there is only the now. See this person in the same light as God, having in him neither past nor future, only one level of eternity. This person has, in truth, had motion taken from him, and all things stand complete within him. Nothing new comes to him from future things, nor by chance either, for he dwells in the now, forever new and ceaselessly renewed. So completely does God rule in this same power.

There is another power, also undying, proceeding from the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, wholly spiritual. In this power God is fiery, ablaze with all his riches, with all his sweetness and with all his bliss. Indeed, in this power there is such sharp joy, such intense, measureless delight, as no one can tell or ever truly make known. I say further, if a person once truly glimpsed in intellectual vision the bliss and joy that is there, then all his sufferings, everything God means for him to suffer, would be a trifle, next to nothing to him. More than that, I say it would be pure joy and pleasure.

Do you want to know for certain whether your sufferings are your own or God's? Tell it by this sign. Suffering for yourself, in whatever way, hurts you and is hard to bear. But suffering for God and for God alone does not hurt you and does not weigh you down, because God carries the load. Believe me, if there were a person willing to suffer for the sake of God and God alone, then even if the combined sufferings of the whole world fell on him all at once, it would not trouble him or weigh him down, because God would carry his burden. If a burden put on my neck is immediately taken up by someone else, I would as soon carry a hundred pounds as one, because it is not heavy or hard on me. In short: a person's sufferings borne for God and God alone, he makes both light and pleasant.

I opened this sermon with the words: Jesus went up into a fastness and was received by a virgin who was wife. Why? She had to be virgin and wife both. I have explained how Jesus was received. I have not yet told the meaning of this fastness, and that I will now do.

From time to time I speak of the one power in the soul which alone is free. Sometimes I have called it the tabernacle of the soul, sometimes a spiritual light, and at other times I call it a spark. But now I say it is neither this nor that. Yet it is something, something more exalted above this and that than the heavens are above the earth. So now I name it in a nobler way than before, with regard to the rank and manner which it goes beyond. It is free of all names and empty of all forms, exempt and free as God is in himself. It is one and simple as God is one and simple, and no one can in any way look into it. In this same power I am speaking of, God blooms and flourishes in all his Godhead, and the spirit lives in God. In this very power the Father begets his only Son no less than he does in himself, for truly he lives in this power, the spirit with the Father giving birth there to his very Son, itself being this same Son, for in this light, which is the light of truth, it is the Son himself. If you could see with my heart you would understand my words, but it is true, for truth itself has said it.

So one and simple is this fastness, standing above all ways, which I have in mind and am telling you of, within the soul, that this high faculty I speak of is not even worthy of a passing glance into it. Nor dare that other power, in which God glows and burns, look into it either, so one and undivided is this refuge, so far beyond every way and power is this solitary one, that no manner and no faculty ever has any sight of it, not even God himself. Never for a single instant, as God lives, does God see into this, nor did he ever look into it in his conditioned nature, in his guise as Person. Mark this well: this one alone lacks every mode and quality. It follows that for God to see into it would cost him all his divine names and all his personal properties. He would have to give up all of these to look in. Only as one and undivided, having not the least mode or quality, not Father nor Son nor Holy Ghost as such, can he do this: as something, yes, but not as this or that.

As one and undivided, see him entering this one that I here call the fastness of the soul, for in no other guise can he get in. Only this way does he enter and dwell in it. In part the soul is the same as God, but not wholly. This that I tell you is true. Truth is my witness and my soul is the pledge. May we be this fastness into which Jesus, on his ascending, is received to dwell forever, as I have said. So help us God. Amen.