Real Life's Work: Real Return to God—The Divine Declaration of Our Dependence
Nothing and none imbues with awe as does the grace-radiant beckoning of Love. Only helpless can we answer, only subdued can we consent. Impossibility capitulates to infinite holiness.
Nothing and none imbues with awe as does the grace-radiant beckoning of Love. Only helpless can we answer, only subdued can we consent. Impossibility capitulates to infinite holiness.
Like loyally pokes and prods like—at the nearest, merest occasion, in purest intent—to drag stiff limbs out of Acedia's dreadful cave into Hope's refreshing grove, and on: to live out the Path, and drink in the restoring miles, of Arrival.
The One Life, Heart and Root launches me out and beckons me on, homeward, in the Way of Return's constant discovery—the everlasting Meaning. Outside the Way, nothing remains.
Life's shape resolves, with slow-gathering exultation, in successive incursions of Eternity's Lordship. Created in the image of God, we are made to feel, gladly, the gentle tug and pull of His Order, and, gladly, comply.
The paradoxes of divine-human symbiosis: the Lord breaks in by invitation; He rules with no cudgel yet cuts through tough walls of Self's worst bondage with sovereign liberty—the alacrity of ownership—that living temple and dwelling deity might jointly reap Love's selfless triumph.
Within you is the wherewithal, for Christ is in you; His sense must prevail over the unmoored nonsense of sin-swamped self; thecommonsense of the Kingdom must break out in God-seeded Personhood, exalting the Man Who poured Himself out against sin's tide, and rose Creation's Hero, the crown of Humanity.
When Christ prevails in us, when His Love reigns, then our destiny is His never-ending story, an eternally unfolding facet of the self-originating Glory. Love's nail-pierced hands carve our destiny—out of surrendered spirit, inmost submission, the private communion of sacred encounter.
The divine declaration of our dependence is the brilliant disclosure of His beneficence; it illuminates the prospect of our emerging liberty as real participants at Love's Council.
Real return to God: a journey promising comfort and crisis, assurance and perplexity; Living Truth is not approached without the ripping away, bit by bit, of all that will not commit...perfection.
Real life's real work requires sanctification's toil: Truth's reckoning dispels vaporous persona—the soul is unmasked to the Light; the Divine Work makes a path where there was only pain; the Path is the Rising Divine Life, resurgent and restoring.
The Path is Being's only Way; the summons thereto, Liberation from every shallow pretext for what is less than Being; Faith takes to the Path in consent to Love, to being in Love, to untrammeled being, fashioned in Love.
Self subdued to divine rule—this is humility's power; the flowering of peace in Love forever—this is the Crown of Righteousness.
Subdued to divine rule, self is abandoned to divine desire and raised to divine life. The endless flowering of His life is our eternal authenticity.
Mere concepts cannot bring you authentic contentment; clever ideation cannot generate a hope greater than you. Spiritual realization is rooted in, and springs from, the medium of entire obedience to Him Who exceeds you, the medium of disciplined, eager pursuit of His surpassing, all-enfolding beneficence.
In Christ we're rooted in what's beyond us; the dreadful alternative is to be rooted in what's beneath us. The "Beyond" births life's enlivening vistas, engenders the Meaning incarnate in faithful word and deed.
When we are willing to see, the Lord will supply the living vision; when we are willing to follow, the Lord will supply the force of spirit; when we are willing to enter, the Lord will usher us into the measureless chamber—but never for the erection of our own monuments....
Ineluctably Accountable: because He has revealed, we—willingly, consciously, or not—respond. No exhibition of our gifts (of His own giving) can win life's unwinnable Hope and Fulfillment. There is no faith where there is not the courage of conscious response; no substitution redeems but His; no answer but "the faith of Christ Jesus."
The image of the Creator is the original law of our being—we choose, finally, for or against the Principle of life's beatitude; to choose "for", He urges us: "that they might have life and have it abundantly."
God the Center, precedes everything, is prior to everything, breaks into everything. The Center will not be marginalized; He demands meeting, and mutuality. Don't put it off. Live it out. Become.
Nothing is your property in Love; least of all your becoming. Though you answer for it, you cannot control it—it is not a machine; it is unconcealable outcome. The texture of your life subsists in the One you worship.
We 'find' the Way by no device or acuity of our own. The Son, given from eternity, gives Himself to our helpless poverty. Only He finds, or all is lost.
It's because Life is His. The Origin and Conclusion of all things are His, whatever constructions we might prefer to Him. Because Life is His, the soul that would live dare not withdraw from His touch—His indomitable, inscrutable, living touch.
No matter how stressful and frazzling life is, we're intended and appointed to 'handle it'—by living from the Center, Who is always near.
His intention is good, its eventuality vouchsafed in His goodness, and its realizations many—in small, daily triumphs of spirit. We never master the Center, but in Him we master all things.
He is all in all, in life's great and small joy and pain. Because He is, we need... beatifically. He so deigns, orders, blesses. To long for 'more' is to be enemy to your own soul.
Ordained to live in Love's knowledge, vigilantly embrace Heaven's mercy. So mercied, awakened, freed, your soul, Heaven's child, will stream with Heaven's compassion.
Paradoxes: the soul's hopeless dead-end is God's rich entry point, the launching pad for hope-drenched spirit's flight; the soul does not know what streams it craves—it can choose never to know, or yield to Truth's invasion.
His invasion, our regeneration: the road home springs to view, stretching from the dead-end on—to where we belong, to where we've never been, to where, finally, all our bemercied steps will have led. But no road appears, there at dead-end, when self-esteem shuns the Invader.
The daunting Newness demands stark, daring choice; the choice manifests destiny that will always have been: will the ruins of Self remain fruitless, or will they rise from the fertile soil of the miraculous Word?
No corner or moment of our life escapes the single supernal Necessity and its all-subsuming Meaning—such is the adamant gift of Love's Self-Trueness. We can't make out the far shores, but Love bids us unfurl our sails to His Spirit driving us relentlessly there.
