Hearing the eternal Word, and St Paul's wish to leave God for God

Qui audit me non confundetur (Eccl. 24:30): He who hears me is not ashamed. The eternal wisdom of the Father says, 'He who hears me is not ashamed.' (If he is ashamed, he is ashamed of his shame.) 'He who works in me does not sin. He who reveals me and fears me shall have everlasting life.' I will consider first these words of the eternal wisdom, 'He who hears me is not ashamed' (or, confounded). To hear the eternal wisdom of the Father, a person must be within, at home, and by themselves.

Three things keep us from hearing the eternal Word. The first is body, the second is number, and the third is time. If we were rid of these three things we would be living in eternity and in the spirit, alone in the desert listening to the eternal Word. But our Lord says, 'No one hears my word or my teaching until they are free from self.' To hear God's Word demands complete self-surrender. The one who hears and the one who is heard are one in the eternal Word. What the eternal Father teaches is his own essence, his nature, his whole godhood, which he reveals to us entirely in his Son, teaching us to be the Son himself.

A person who has gone out of themselves and is the only-begotten Son has what belongs to the only Son. God's work and teaching are all done in his Son. God works with the sole purpose of making us his only Son. As soon as he sees that we are his only Son, God rushes toward us; he comes close to shattering his own essence, emptying his very self, in his rash hurry to show us the whole depth of his Godhead, the fullness of his true nature. God flies to make this ours just as it is his. Here God enjoys and delights in his fullness. And this person who is within God's love and knowledge is nothing other than what God himself is. Loving yourself, you love all people as yourself. While you love anyone less than your own self, you do not love yourself in truth. Not until you love all people as yourself, all people in one person who is both God and man. The one who loves themselves and all people as themselves is righteous, completely just.

Sometimes people say, 'I care for my friends and those who are good to me more than I care for other people.' But I say that is wrong, that it is imperfect. True, we must make do with it, as we make do with a side wind to cross the sea: it will still get us there. Our preference for one person over another is like that, it is natural. To love another as myself means I would be just as willing for their fate, for good or ill, for life or death, to happen to me as to them, which would amount to perfect understanding.

On this point St Paul says, 'I would wish to be cut off from God forever, for God's sake and for the sake of my friends.' And as you know, to leave God for an instant is to leave God forever, and to leave God at all is the torment of hell. What then does St Paul mean by wishing to be cut off from God? Theologians debate whether St Paul was still on the way to his perfection or whether he had already reached it. I say he was perfect, otherwise he could not have said this.

I will put into plain words what St Paul means by wishing to be parted from God. The last and highest leave-taking a person can make is leaving God for God. St Paul left God for God: he left everything he could give or take of God, every concept of God. In leaving these he left God for God, since God remained to him in his true self, not as a concept of himself, nor as something acquired, but God in his true reality. This is not a matter of give and take between himself and God, it is the one and perfect union. Here a person is the true person whom suffering can no more touch than it can touch the divine essence, for, as I have said before, there is something in the soul so closely bound to God that it is one with him and not merely united to him. It is one, it has nothing in common with nothing and is nothing to anything. Anything created is nothing. It is far off and foreign to creatures. If a person were wholly this, they would be wholly uncreated and uncreaturely. If everything temporal were so, were taken up into this one, it would be nothing else than the unity itself. If I were to find myself in this state even for a single instant, I should think no more of myself than of a worm.

God gives to everything alike, and as they flow forth from God all things are equal: angels, humans, and creatures all proceed from God alike in their first emanation. To take things in their first emanation is to take them all alike. If here in time they are alike, in God, in eternity, they are far more so. Any flea as it is in God is nobler than the highest of the angels is in itself. All things are the same in God: they are God himself.

God delights so much in this likeness that he pours out his whole nature, his whole substance, into it, in his own self. The joy and satisfaction of it cannot be put into words. It is like a horse let loose in a rich meadow, giving vent to its horse-nature by galloping full-tilt around the field: it enjoys this, and it is its nature. In just the same way, God's joy and satisfaction in what is like him finds its outlet in his pouring out his entire nature and being into this likeness, for he is this likeness himself.

It is a question whether the angels who live here with us, to serve and guard us, have less of this likeness in their joy than those who remain in eternity. Is it in any way a loss to them to be serving and protecting us? No, not at all. Their joy is undiminished, and so is their likeness, for the work of the angels is the will of God, and the will of God is the work of the angels. Neither in their joy, their likeness, nor their work are these angels held back. If God told an angel to go pick caterpillars off a tree, the angel would obey at once, indeed, since it is God's will, it would be the angel's happiness.

Being established in God's will, a person will want only what God wants and nothing else. If they are sick, they will not want to be well. To them all pain is pleasure, multiplicity is pure and single, as long as they are truly in the will of God. Yes, even the pains of hell would be joy and happiness to them. They have left themselves and are free, open to all that comes. My eye can see color because it is free to be colored. When I see blue or white, my eye, in seeing the color, takes on the color it sees. The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

A person who is in the love of God in this way is dead to self and to all created things, no more mindful of themselves than someone a thousand miles away. This person lives in likeness, in unity, and there is no unlikeness in them. This person has left the world and left themselves as well. Suppose someone owned the whole world and gave it up for God's sake, just as they had received it: then God would give them back the world, and eternal life besides. And if there were a second person, having nothing but the good will for it, who thought, 'Lord, if this whole world were mine, or even two such worlds, or any number I might choose, I would give it up, and myself along with it, entire, just as I received it from you,' God would reward that person no less than if they had actually given it with their own hand. Another person, with nothing at all to give up, neither in body nor in spirit, would be the most given-up of all. Whoever gives up self completely, even for one instant, to them all will be given. To leave oneself for twenty years and then take oneself back for even an instant is never to have left oneself at all. The one who both has given up and remains given up, who never looks back at what they have given up but stays firm, unshaken, and unmoved in themselves, that person is free. May we remain steadfast and unmoved, like the eternal Father. So help us God and his eternal Wisdom. Amen.