Intelligible Forms

Understanding accomplishes all that forgiveness accomplishes and more. Likewise, as understanding is to forgiveness, so love is with respect to understanding. In the same direction, forgiveness walks, understanding runs, and love takes flight.

God took on an intelligible form, and I rejoiced to see Him, but it was only when I saw through this form, -- to what spread out beyond it (to the infinity it implied), -- that God's true face became manifested to me; for He is born and unborn, formed and formless, in time and in eternity, present and unsearchable, human and divine; He is many and He is one, He is good and more than good, all and more than all; He is and is not.

My Teacher is no less human than divine. He laughs, cries, bleeds, and dies for his enemies, who are also his friends. He feels pain, longing, and affection, yet dwells in peace beyond the world. He is noble and he is plain; his body draped in rags, but his countenance as gold.

Christ "forgave" man in order to demonstrate the love of God, which had never, could never, judge man to begin with. The problem is that man has yet to forgive himself, or to have faith in the love of God as manifested in Christ. Man's guilt is a delusion, and is not the consequence, but the origin of sin. The Gospel of Love is this: "Man is not forgiven because he is good, but is good because he is forgiven." But forgiveness granted is very far from forgiveness received. It is the same gulf which divides belief from unbelief, and man from God.

Humility is perhaps composed of equal parts guilt and gratitude; gratitude for the mercy poured out so freely by Love, without regard to differences among persons. Some argue that one must recognize one's sinfulness, or wretchedness (a lovely word), in order to recognize the sublime beauty and significance of God's love. I begin to suspect that the opposite method may not only be just as effective, but that it is almost more of an end than a means; that this recognition of sin is a natural response to the contemplation of love, at least, in the early stages (and who do we know who is not in the early stages?). We already live in our wretchedness, and to be lifted up into the contemplation of love is necessarily to test our wings, to feel palpably their weakness, and to fall back down upon our knees. Yet, only this excercise will carry us into the heights, where we shall no longer repent according to our weakness, but revel according to our strength. So long as we are earthbound, we will be conscious of our sin only when we attempt to rise above it. Repentance is not something we ought to seek nor cultivate, for it arises without effort when we contemplate what is above us, just like the stench of sweat rises from the pores of a man unaccustomed to physical activity. Guilt and the consciousness of guilt are the sweat and the stench of spiritual exercise. "The more mercifully I am dealt with, the more tearfully I afflict my soul, because I have been ungrateful to so devoted a Beloved and so faithful a Father." (-Henry Suso)

To miss the mark, or to sin, is to be removed, or rather to perceive oneself as removed, from that universal center -- in oneself, in others, in God, in all things and in between them -- which is LOVE. Once one is removed, or believes one is removed, from this center, nothing one does can be according to the will of God; nor can anything done apart from Love be preserved. The twin delusions of separation and guilt stem from the more fundamental delusion that love is not sufficient.

No man has been so utterly overcome by the power of Christ as to become a second Christ. Yet, unless you yourself be transformed into the Second Coming, and take your place with God as God, then you must be counted an enemy of Christ, who is Love. To be a Christian is to confess one's attachment to self-love (or "small love"), which is rebellion against the Will of God, and to desire ardently to be delivered from self-love by the Grace of God, through increasingly devout contemplation of the words and works of Jesus Christ (and all great teachers through whom God has spoken, more or less consistently) -- and, ultimately, through silent, deep meditation; with no object in mind, save God; who is not an object, but who rather contains and observes the mind, than is contained and observed by it. Bring nothing to mind; that you may bring mind to nothing.


Death rides a broken old nag, who does not gallup, cantor, nor trot; but teeters on match-stick limbs through the towns at a most pathetic pace. This is so that all the people may have time to throw open their shutters (or close them, if they wish), or to sit out on their stoops to point, whisper, and wonder at what it means. Greiving does not pass in haste; but lingers, and staggers, like drunkenness or old age, and makes a kind of spectacle which must be granted space and time to occur; and it's nature insists on being seen.

The Infinite has made level all created things, so that there is not one stone left standing upon another. No man stands higher than any other, for even the cruellest sinner and the gentlest saint are indistinguishable before the majesty of God, which confounds all measure. Christ himself is not above us, lest we mistake him. To perceive him is also to be on a level with him, and to be one with him. The creation itself, and the creature along with it, is consumed in the furnace of the Infinite, and only Christ is left; one no longer exists to perceive, but has become united with the object of perception; uncreated, immaculate, complete.


If the imagination is truly creative, then its products need not be regarded solely as night dreams, morning figments, noontide fancies, nor dusky apparitions. Rather, they might, with good reason, be counted as fully legitimate objects in their own right, possessing a solidity which often outlasts even the objects of sense. And while some objects may be consumed and digested and have influence upon neurological processes, they can never be so deeply assimilated as a clear, beloved notion, which settles in the throne of the heart, and is not easy to unseat. An idea by-passes the blood, and passses directly into "the blood of the blood", provided only that it be understood; for that is to be consumed at the mental level, which is higher and more subtle than the physical. Ideas rot only on the vine, or unwanted in the shade beneath lonely fir trees. But whatever is well understood does not leave us, does not break-down, die, or decompose, unless it is within the mental soil, where it may fertilize a host of ideas not wholly unlike itself; for every father is alive within his son, and every fruit is mysteriously buried in the seed it sows, for the purposes of ressurection.