God's Fatherhood,
Love's Summons, Faith's Choice
One fine day, inescapably, our
created nature's vital center reverberates with Another's call to Encounter
and a Realm not our own. And then, the fateful choice.
A living marriage of divine
and human wills subsists in love 'forsaking all others'—our designs, comforts
and expectations; real life yields to His stark, stunning call.
The price is a choice, the
cost is loss, yet the acquisition all, if our all is indeed the promise and
horizon of His love.
Vacillating and hedging our
bets in the face of the One Great Constant gains nothing but squandered
life-time. We know perfectly well what we are—at least, we glimpse enough
before averting our gaze. He is no bet or calculation but Heaven's unequivocal
conclusion and newness.
The Father lovingly prods His
children to constant surrenders of heart, in the ascent to consecration's
summit, freedom's absolute dominion.
Life's Author answers,
uncompromisingly, everything, wedding finally the compliant and
defiant both to the consummate integrity and exploitation of Holiness.
And we... answer the uncreated Life, in
spirit-echoes transcending word and feeling.
God—the very crucible of
Love's timeless Passion; Christ the Life—un-spared, disfigured, consumed in
sacrifice; Man—slain, reborn, transfigured, driven by holy will to attain the
everlasting desire, freedom's pinnacle, Love's perfect reign.
But God exceeds all mystery, desire, and satisfaction. He is not the 'goal' of our yearning as much as our yearning is the vehicle of His omnipresent meaning. To yield entirely, to cooperate wholly, is to let in and live out the Life that will not submit to our comprehension; it is to belong to the Only Meaning, in Love.
He doesn't stop; it is not accorded us to stop: His
reckoning persists, the inner Witness insists, yearning heightens, and the One
Life, the Holy Peace, is engrafted with the deepest cut—its Truth pervades
within and without.
Direction indicates being;
position substantiates possession; the incorporating Christ is the
never-stemmed out-flood of Original Self-Giving. The Agápē of
God is totalitarian, incrementally clearing, paving, illuminating the single
path of our souls' expansive consent to the Fullness.
The preposterously impossible:
my preeminence, my autocracy, my accountability to none. The
resplendently possible: return, reconciliation, revelation, reality.
In Him, the One Grace that
never relaxes, never compromises, never runs out, never disillusions, but
unflaggingly draws us on, and in, to the wholeness of His Love-charged
Actuality, the miraculous sight of His purity.
Submission is inevitable, to
either the summons of Grace or, finally, the court of Holiness. The summons of
Grace is His matchless invitation to possession of the Living God, everlasting
partnership with Divine Love, perpetual entrance into the Fullness. The summons
comes with a sword, a sundered Temple veil, an unalterable stipulation: Cherish
nothing but His vision, bring nothing in but all your heart, and wholly
sacrifice that to Him.
The Christian Becoming, a
trail of requisites, each in its turn a beatitude: humbled entry, constant
devotion, hard duty, tenacious confidence, fearless, unmixed truth, the
flowering of "Christ in you."
Nothing self might
cling to over His call can ever coax divine sympathy, for no such thing can
generate love; the Call is Love's own appointment to selfless freedom, utter
belonging, unencumbered consecration.
God's superabundant
storehouse of faith is ours to enter, through the narrow Door, but never ours
to micromanage. Vigilance is the certificate of our stewardship; eager
attention to the Master's softest word, the emblem of our belonging.
Yearning, or yielding?
The living stream of His Spirit rightly drives us—past yearning, past
need—into the rightness of our place in the perfect design.
The miracle of
redeemed personhood unfolds one spirit-shaping step at a time.
The miracle cannot be managed
or contained, designed or projected by human genius. Capitulate to His
unrestricted occupation, move in the Kingdom's flow, that is
the sum of our 'input' in the Miracle.
The Infinite Price redeemed us
from everlasting ruin, restored the deathless bond, and recovered holy, saving,
fellowship with the Truth.
Throngs of phantasms, soothing
and familiar, pretend to the priority, but the Creator's crystal calling
pierces and overthrows, startles us beatifically, yet again, to the
Constancy—of faith's only choice, of Love's supreme summons.
Love's summons, Faith's choice....
The Object: the Inevitable Encounter.
The Duty: to stand with Him, for Him, in Him,
Against all that resists Love's inevitable encounter.
God's Fatherhood is
no question of His yielding to all our whims; on the contrary, the divine
initiative defines intrinsic human, humanizing,
motive. This inscrutable interplay of wills strains ceaselessly towards
unobstructed unity—the spacious, and incarnate, co-inhabiting of
divine-human life.
The uncontainable,
all-encompassing, all-substantiating Father births us, in the unutterable
sublimity of grace, into the uncomprehended expanse of the relentless divine
necessity—a fearsome prospect, Love's imperative.
The imperative
compels to the consummate freedom of life's only choice—for Life.
Life to life testifies; Life with life unites in the Spirit's
triumph of revelation: the countenance of Christ, the visage...of Jesus.
This, He, is life's
radiant center and originating passion. Without, outside, apart from Him, no
'place' can be good, no 'self' can be actual. His approach is love,
His touch rescue. To shrink from the touch, to recoil from the Visage, is to
embrace the spaceless void and renounce the abundance of Love's domain.
Come willing to be
pierced; by His piercing we more-than-exist—we embark on Life. His every sign,
whisper, and silence, is liberation, His every way, wholeness.
No eye has seen and
no ear has heard.... Though helpless to imagine it, we
are designed and bidden to perceive it in faith.
In Christ Love's past, present and future coalesce in immediate power; pure
Redemption, the curse-less New Creation, the pristine Goodness, breaks through
in supernal Purpose.
The Kingdom and the Glory are
at hand. The Power is Love Sacrosanct. The Mercy appalls self-sufficiency,
discloses divinity in Need.
Evading the Need, we shun the Truth, and the divinity. But embracing it, we abandon the realm of our neatly arranged expectations, surrendering to Him Who won the Kingdom and the Glory in surrender's supreme height and depth: 'Father, into your hands....'
God's horizon
forever exceeds comprehension, for His promise is infinite. Yet here, now,
traveling the Way, in the infinitesimal moment, God-With-Us is the locus of
infinite potential, the focus of boundless fulfillment—He is
the Giver of all good gifts to Whom we, His gifts, return, and return, and
return, in an ever-burgeoning belonging.
