The crossing: how one true act outweighs a lifetime of effort

Exhibete membra vestra servire iustitiae in sanctificationem (Romans 6:19). St. Paul says: 'Offer your members as servants to righteousness, for holiness.' For the wages of sin is death, but the reward of virtue is eternal life. The soul has only two members to offer in the kind of service that is acceptable to God, and these are the will and the understanding.

One master says that God puts the whole force of his will into loving the soul. But my point is that God's only purpose in loving the soul is to make her love him in return. Again, I hold that God devotes his divine nature to pleasing the soul, to making her like him, to letting her enjoy his company, be his friend, and love him. Third, I hold that this love which rises up in the ground of the soul, springing out of the ground of the Godhead, is the very same love with which God loves his only-begotten Son, nothing less. And fourth, if it is true that man is planted in God the way he is planted in a creature, then I maintain that this is in the very ground

of the Holy Ghost's being and becoming, the very ground where the Holy Ghost comes forth in blossom.

St. Paul does well to say, 'Offer your members.' For the intellect, though natural, is too exalted to be moved by worldly things. Yet when it is given back to the source it came from, it is absorbed into God, and becomes what absorbs it. The will, that is the true will, is as such all-powerful. But thousands die without ever gaining this genuine will. No doubt they had desires and inclinations, as other animals do. One man does something small, does it only once, and sends it up on the wings of praise and thanks to its source. Another man does something important, something that occupies him for a long time and keeps him constantly busy, and yet this small thing done once is more pleasing to God than the other man's great work that cost him so much time and effort. Why is that? I will tell you. Because the small act was carried up out of time into the now of eternity, and so it was entirely pleasing to God. Even if a man were to live through all the time from Adam to the Last Judgment doing good works, the one who, acting in his highest and purest part, crosses over from time into eternity, truly, in God's sight, this man does and achieves far more than anyone who lives through all that past and future time, because this now contains the whole of time within it.

One master says that in this crossing over from time into the now, each power of the soul will surpass itself. The five powers must pass into her common power (or common sense), and the common sense will vanish into the formless power where nothing takes form. Intellect and will are transcended there. It is true that grace is a created thing, but not entirely so. The soul has no grace of her own except in her ground, and above this ground of the soul grace belongs by nature. There grace does nothing, though it works through the use of her powers, but in the ground of the soul, grace, blessedness, and God's own ground are one and the same life in which God lives. There the power behind the eye is as noble as the understanding; there foot and eye are equal in rank. What the soul is in her ground has never been determined. But Paul says, 'The grace of God is eternal life.' Paul also says, 'The wages of sin is death.' All the deaths that men die are as nothing compared to the death of the soul who is cut off from God, from which may God keep us.