God-children, the christened, and the godfathers in Sermon 92

Posui vos ut eatis et fructum afferatis (John 15:16): 'I have appointed you to go and bring forth fruit.' Christ said this to his disciples. God spoke it to them and to all of us who are in darkness. Being in the dark, we need a light to walk by. But Christ says: 'I am the light of the world.' If we remain in the true love of our head, we will be lit by Christ. A candle keeps burning at the tip because it is in contact with the flame, which consumes the wax that feeds it and turns it into itself.

Notice this. When Christ said to his disciples, 'I have appointed you to go,' he meant our being taken up into the light of grace. The prophet says, 'I was sitting when he took me up into himself.' Sitting, we stop groping, and in the light we can see our way, namely the way of virtue. That is what Christ means by 'I have appointed you to go.' Sitting is not going. We cannot walk the right way unless we first sit in the light of contemplation and work out which way to take. All our works must be a light to lighten our neighbor's darkness.

Now Dionysius says: 'These who have thus gone out of themselves and live in the light of truth, these, I say, are the christened; they are god-children and godfathers.' Bishop Albert explains this as follows. God-children are those who, reading the holy scriptures or hearing them read, take them to heart and show them forth in good works, through which they finally find the truth in God. The christened, again, are dead in God; there is nothing alive in them anymore but God. As Saint Paul says, 'We are dead, and our life is hidden with Christ in God.' But the most perfect of all are the godfathers, who are drowned in the unfathomable depth of God. God does more than live in them, they are alive in God, and the beginning of eternal life is already in them.

Consider now those who are god-children. Understanding the scriptures in the light of faith, they come into the dew of grace, and in this gracious dew they breathe in the fragrance of the path of eternal life. As the Bride says in the Book of Love, 'Take me along with you, out into your desert, in to your stronghold.' Out in the desert means detached from creatures; the inner stronghold is the sure knowledge of truth that neither life nor death can change. Such are these god-children, children of power and wisdom and goodness. To them our Lord cries in the Book of Love, 'How beautiful are your feet in sandals, O prince's daughter!' The sandals are the holy life put on the feet of love and knowledge, in the desire to walk in that life. But the christened are in mystical union with God and are actually living the life of God. What can I say of them? In their eating and drinking, their sleeping, and their whole way of life, there is nothing to be found but God, if we only knew it. Burn them, and they give off nothing but the taste of divinity, the sweetness of the Holy Spirit, which has filled them through and through. But no one knows this except the children of true light, and him in whom they dwell, namely God. The children of darkness do not know it, their hearts being full of the poison of everlasting death. So the light is turned to darkness in them, and the eternal sweetness to bitterness. May God light us with the light we once basked in, in his Son, eternally, so that we may pass from darkness into the true light!

But the third class, called godfathers, climbing hill and mountain, have followed the track of the true sons with will and knowledge, and the burning heat of the Holy Spirit has burnt up all their matter, so that they now show only the one light in God. In this light they have come to rest, at peace after their labors, the peace of absolute consciousness, a peace that is never disturbed. Thought fails when speaking of these fathers, for they have received every good and perfect gift from the Father of lights and have reached the goal of virtue. This goal John the soaring eagle saw, wondering, in the Apocalypse. And Christ answered him, saying, 'I am the first without beginning and the last that has no end.' Amen.