CHAPTER VI

GLORIFIED

Life is not life if it be not life from death.
And God is not God if
He be not the end of men.
– Karl Earth.

When the evening of this life comes,
you will be judged on love.
– St. John of the Cross.

AT the heart of Christianity,
the clue to its astonishing history and persistent power,
we find a contrast,
a crisis,
a transformation.
The contrast is that between the life before and after Calvary.
The crisis which marks the transition is the Passion;
that great gesture of unblemished charity in which, as St. John says,

we know love.

The transformation is that of man's limited nature,
his narrow self, as we know it here,
into something new, strange and lovely;
possessed of a mysterious power and freedom, a fresh kind of life,
and spending this life within our everyday existence to serve and save men.
Only a spiritual sequence which is completed in this life-giving life is fully sane and fully Christian.
The Pattern which is shown to us is a pattern which lives and moves and changes as we must live and move and change.

Those who give themselves to the life of the spirit
are brought bit by bit, as they can bear it and respond to it,
to that crisis in which all they have won seems taken away from them;
and they are faced by the demand for complete self-surrender,
an act of unconditional trust.
But this is not the end of the story.
The self-abandonment of the Cross is a transition from the half-real to the real;
it is the surrender of our separate self-hood,
even our spiritual self-hood – the last and most difficult offering of love –
so that we may enter by this strait gate, so hard to find and so unpromising in appearance,
that life-giving life of triumphant charity for which humanity is made.
Only those who are generous up to the limits of self-loss can hope to become channels of the generosity of God.
In that crisis the I,
the separate self, with its loves and hates, its personal preoccupations,
is sacrificed and left behind.
And out of this most true and active death to self,
the spirit is reborn into the real life:
not in some other transcendental world,
but in this world,
among those who love us
and those we love.

So the Crucifix,
which is the perfect symbol of generous sacrifice,
is the perfect symbol of victory too:
of the love which shirks nothing
and so achieves everything,
the losing and the finding of life.

He was crucified,
dead and buried –
rose again and ascended.

With this double statement
the Creed, the rule of prayer, reaches its climax,
and shows us in a sentence the deepest meaning of our life:
declaring in plain language
that unlimited self-offering
is the only path from man to God.

This means that the Thought of God,
penetrating our tangled world
and entering into union with our imperfect nature,
saves and transforms that nature,
raises it to a new level, not by power,
but by the complete exercise of courageous love;
the deliberate facing of the world's worst.
And we,
following the footsteps of that holy Life which reveals reality, must take the same way.

As dying and behold we live

is a literal fact for the genuine Christian.
The release of power, the transformation of life which comes from unconditional self-abandonment,
is guaranteed to us by the story of Easter and the Forty Days:
its continuance in the sacraments and the saints.
We too achieve all by risking all.
Christianity is a triumphant heroism.
The valiant obedience of the Blessed Virgin makes the Incarnation possible:
the more complete and awful self-giving of the Cross makes the life-giving life of the Church and the Saints possible.
The ancient Easter Sequence sums it up :

Death and Life strove together in awful combat;
The Lord of Life, who died, living reigns.

And yet this reign, with its strange triumphant beauty,
is not manifested in any of the sensational incidents of which Apocalyptic writers had dreamed;
by a sudden coming in the Clouds of Heaven,
or by the shattering of our ordinary human world.
Still true to the Divine method of hiddenness and humility,
it comes back into that world very quietly;
brought by love,
and only recognized by love.
It appears by preference in connection with the simple realities of everyday existence,
and exercises its enlightening, pacifying, strengthening influence in and through these homely realities.
Personal needs,
friendly affections,
become the consecrated channels of the immortal Love,
which declares its victories by a quiet and tender benediction
poured out on ordinary life.

The glory of the Divine Humanity is not shown in the Temple and the Synagogue.
He seeks out His nervous followers within the arena of ordinary life;
meets them behind the locked doors of the Upper Room,
waits for them in early morning by the lake side,
walks with them on the country road,
and suddenly discloses Himself in the breaking of bread.
The characters of the old life
which are carried through into this new and glorified life
are just those which express a homely and cherishing love.
It is the One who had fed the multitude,
pacified the distracted,
washed the dusty feet of His followers
and given Himself to be their food,
who now re-enters their troubled lives;
for their sake, not for His own.

For us, these scenes have an other-worldly beauty.
We see them bathed in the supernatural light.
But for Peter and Thomas, James and John,
they happened under normal conditions of time and place.
Frightened, weary and discouraged,
worried about the future and remorseful about the past,
for them the wonder abode in the quiet return of the Holy and Immortal
who was yet the familiar and the human,
to the commonplace surroundings in which they had known Him best.
Silently disregarding their disappointing qualities, their stupidity, cowardice and lack of trust,
He came back to them in a pure impetus of charity;
came down to their level as one that serveth,
making visible the Invisible Love,
and gave the guarantees which their petty standards demanded and their narrow souls could apprehend.
Thus, by this unblemished courtesy,

"binding His majesty to our lowliness,"

as the Byzantine liturgy says,
He restored their faith, hope and charity;
and gave them an example only less searching in its self-oblivious gentleness
than the lesson of the washing of the feet.

Even their own fragmentary notes of what happened, or seemed to them to happen,
shame and delight us by their witness to the splendour and humility of generous love.

"My Lord!"

says St. Thomas, seeing, touching, and measuring the Holiness
so meekly shown to him in his own crude terms;
and then, passing beyond that sacramental revelation
to the unseen, untouched, unmeasured,
uttering the word every awakened soul longs to utter –

"My God!"

The very heart of the Christian revelation is disclosed in that scene.

So it is that the real mark of spiritual triumph –
the possession of that more lovely, more abundant life which we discern in moments of deep prayer –
is not an abstraction from this world,
but a return to it;
a willing use of its conditions as material for the expression of love.
There is nothing high-minded about Christian holiness.
It is most at home in the slum, the street, the hospital ward:
and the mysteries through which its gifts are distributed
are themselves chosen from amongst the most homely realities of life.
A little water,
some fragments of bread,
and a chalice of wine
are enough to close the gap between two worlds;
and give soul and senses a trembling contact with the Eternal Charity.
By means of these its creatures, that touch still cleanses, and that hand still feeds.
The serene, unhurried, self-imparting which began before Gethsemane continues still.
Either secretly or sacramentally,
every Christian is a link in the chain of perpetual penitents and perpetual communicants
through which the rescuing Love reaches out to the world.
Perhaps there is no more certain mark of a mature spirituality
than the way in which those who possess it
are able to enter a troubled situation and say, "Peace,"
or turn from the exercise of heroic love
to meet the humblest needs of men.

One of the few passages of spiritual value in the Apocryphal Gospels,
and the only one that has left its mark on the Creed,
is that which describes the coming of the soul of Christ into the unseen world of the departed:
His "descent into hell" to the rescue of those "spirits in prison" to whom the revelation of the Divine Charity had not been given on earth. Some of the greatest of the mediaeval painters have found in that story the perfect image of triumphant love.
They show us the liberated soul of Jesus,
robed in that humanity which has endured the anguish of the Passion,
passing straight from this anguish to the delighted exercise of a saving charity.
He comes with an irresistible rush,
bearing the banner of redemption to the imprisoned souls of those who knew Him not.
There they are,
pressing forward to the mouth of the cave;
the darkness, narrowness and unreality from which He comes to free them,
at His own great cost.
The awed delight of the souls He rescues, is nothing beside the Rescuer's own ecstatic delight.
It is as if the charity self-given on Calvary could not wait a moment,
but rushed straight to the awaiting joy of releasing the souls of men.
There is no hint of the agony and darkness through which He has won the power to do this.
Everything is forgotten
but the need which the Rescuer is able to meet.

That scene, if we place it – as we should do – before the lovely story of Easter and the Forty Days, helps us to an understanding of their special quality; and sets before us once for all Rescuing Love as the standard of Christian holiness, and its production in us as the very object of our transformation.
For this is our tiny share in that Divine action
which brings the supernatural charity right down into the confusions and sorrows of our life,
to "save" and transform.
Here we look at Sanctity,
that "risen life" which has power,
and triumphs in virtue of its love.
And the deepest truth about ourselves is,
that we are human beings;
and therefore have in ourselves the capacity for this same triumph of the power that is love,
if we are willing to face the cost.
The cost is that crucifying struggle with natural self-love,
that passive endurance of the Divine action,
which brings the soul out of the narrow,
even though it be apparently an intense, individual life religious life –
into the wide self-spending universal life of the Divine Charity.

"We know that we have passed out of death into life,
because we love the brethren."

But tension, suffering, and utter helplessness mark that crucial change.

When Christ said,

"My Father and your Father –
My God and your God,"

He made a declaration which must enslave and transfigure the whole lives of those who realize what is implied in it;
conferring on them the tremendous privilege of partnership.

"Fellow-workers with God,
because co-heirs with Christ."

After that, the soul's own life is to be

"in the Spirit ":

that is, delivered from the tension and struggle of those who are ever striving to adjust the claims of two worlds,
because gladly subordinated to the mighty purposes of God.
Everything is left behind which does not contribute to those purposes;
and so, all that is left is harmonized within His peace.
To them that are perishing, says St. Paul, such a programme is foolishness:

"but unto us which are being saved it is the Power of God."

It is, in fact, what Christianity really means;
and if Christians chose to stand up to this obligation,
they could transform the world.

"Where the Spirit of the Father is,"
said St. Irenaeus,
"there is a Living Man:
living because of his share in the Spirit,
man because of the substance of his flesh."

Other men are, at best, half alive.
And the Spirit of the Father is Creative Love.
That is the fundamental quality which man shares with God,
and which constitutes his kinship with God.
Where this rules his life
he becomes, in one way or another,
an agent of the Eternal Charity.
That of course in its perfection is the secret of the Saints;
the cause of what we call their "supernatural power."

"My Father and your Father"

means, then, that we are the children of the Eternal Perfect,
Whose essential nature is generous Love;
and that we are destined to manifest the splendour of God in and through the homely scenes,
the long and arduous labours, self-givings and sufferings,
which the Divine Wisdom irradiated once and irradiates still.
It means a new quality of life possible to us and awaiting us;
not somewhere else,
but where we are now.

This quality of life is already manifest,
wherever the limiting forms of human devotion, human suffering, human service
are given in simplicity to the total purposes of God.
For Reality has been shown to us incarnate among men,
so that we may try to weave its pattern into the texture of human life;
redeeming that life from ugliness,
and making it a garment of God.
It is not a conspicuous pattern.
The shimmer of holiness appears upon the surface mostly in obscure acts of sacrifice and quiet selfless deeds.
But when we look behind, and trace this delicate beauty to its source,
what we see is a living Love;
so individual, and yet so general,
that on one hand the relation of each spirit to that Spirit is unique and complete,
and on the other the love poured out on one subtracts nothing from the love given to all.

To realize this is already to move out from the narrow experience of the pious individualist,
absorbed in the contemplation of his own spiritual shortcemings and desires,
to the glorious liberty of those whose life is cleansed of all self-occupation,
and flows out in delighted response to the demand of God and the needs of man:

"being made the children of God and of the light,"

as the baptismal service has it.
Our petty worries, faults, anxieties and ignorances,
our careful discriminations in practice and belief,
even our deplorable rebellions and antipathies
fade and shrivel when we see our total destiny like this,
and sink our small efforts in the vast tide of the Eternal Spirit's life.
We taste then, in our limited way, something of that experience which transfigured the Twelve;
imparted to them the life-giving life,
and sent them out to spread it through the world.

And indeed, the Christian is required for this and for no other purpose;
to be one more worker for the Kingdom, one more transmitter of the Divine Charity, the great spendthrift action of God.
From the first, the transmitters have been ordinary faulty people like ourselves.

"He gave Himself in either kind,"

not to a select company of sanctified souls,
but to unstable Peter,
dubious Thomas,
pushful James and John ;
Paul, who had persecuted Him as sincerely and as savagely as any modern rationalist,
and who had consented to His martyr's death.
They must have seemed a very unlikely collection.
But they were surrendered, and so they could be used;
woven into the tissue of that Church which transmits the triumphant and all-sacrificing life.

That life indwells the world and the world knows it not;
largely because those to whom it is given fail to disclose it.
Christians, that "nation" as the New Testament calls them,
who exist only to be the wide-open channels of the inpouring Spirit of Charity,
block its passage by their interior hardness,
their spiritual selfishness, apathy, love of comfort,
their petty and sterile religious outlook.
They are too timid, too ca' canny, to risk losing their own lives ;

to give themselves with undemanding generosity, in order to find the all-generous Life of God.

It is easy enough to appreciate the lovely vision of that all-generous Life,
poured out through human channels to transform the life of men.
All our religious pussy cats can enjoy the beauty of the design,
and bask in the golden light which illuminates it.
Their vague idealism and fussy optimism and sentimental other-worldliness
all feel warmer and brighter when that radiance falls upon them.
But they do not care to face the fact that the design is a working-drawing,
which we are required to carry out with the homely materials in hand.
The worth of men is not judged by their admiration of its beauty,
but by the perfection with which it is reproduced within their own lives.
That which we are shown in contemplation we are required to express in action:
not by our peculiar beliefs and punctual religious practices,
but simply by the exercise of Rescuing Love.

The immortal Figure of Christ,
God's pattern for humanity,
stands over against life;
and judges it by irradiating it.
He sets the standard,
shows what man is meant to be;
revealing Himself in every demand on our generosity, however homely,
and by that demand alone and our response to it
separating the real from the unreal,
the living from the dead.
Yet in the deepest sense,
even that response is not truly our own.
It is the One God, in­dwelling in His deep humanity His little human creatures,
Who stirs in us and initiates each movement of Charity;

"secretly inciting,"
says von Hugel,
"what He openly crowns."

And now we begin to see a certain sequence in those mysteries
through which His Reality is brought into focus for us;
or, in the language of theology,

"the Word is made flesh."

That sequence begins where life begins right down in the natural order,
leaving no phase of our common experience outside the radiance of love.
It develops among homely things, quietly, slowly, and without sensational incidents;
subject to all the common tests, strains, joys and duties of our human existence,
and through and within them increasing in wisdom and stature.
Confronted in the deep solitude of the wilderness by man's crucial choice between self-interest and self-loss,
this Life rejects everything that is less than God;
everything that ministers to self-will.
So, emerging into the unsullied light of truth it manifests truth;
teaching the Will of God for men, and the path men must follow to God.
And because this is the life of One who sees men as they are, knowing what is in man,
there pours out through it that wide, loving and creative compassion
which is the only source of healing and of help.
By the interplay of that pure truth and that warm compassion,
it becomes filled with a rescuing and redeeming Power,
which transcends difficulties and does not notice dangers;
and this Power is made perfect in sacrifice –
the Eucharist, Gethsemane, and the Cross.
Thus by a path which never departs from the human landscape
we are led out and up beyond the human landscape,
to a Divine revelation that yet is deeply human,
and a human revelation that is completely Divine.