I know you.

Of course I don't know you, Infinite Wonder.

Haven't I wasted the finitude of my life by running and hiding from you?

But I know you. I know you because you have thrust yourself upon me. You, Love; you, Lover, have made nothing of my nothingness, made little of my great escapes. Love, you have loved ferociously. Only because your fierce eyes will not allow me to avert for long from yours do I know you. I know you in the heat of battling not to know you, to not-know you, but the heat, because half -- the infinite half -- is yours, ignites light and I cannot deny the beauty, the love, the you that you forcibly arrow into my eyeballs. Ah, God!

Why do you do this?

I must not ask silly questions.

When in Spring the doe works up the mountain from the foothills to browse the fresh new leaves, it is because the leaves are there now, the shoots are shooting. She knows through instinct and winter hunger and she is drawn, compelled by the promise of new life. So when you in your heat melt away my snows, when you break through and green-fill my eyes, I am drawn, compelled. I love. This is my love: the iron filings to the magnet. How can I say “I love you”? I should say, “I am won by you to loving you.”

But that is a long and clumsy expression.

I love you.

Why do I shake Earth and the Heavens to sift the snows down upon me, dead-whiten my world?

-- Silly to ask why.

I cannot understand my own wickedness in iglooing myself away from your attacks any more than I can explain the unbelievable goodness of your desiring me.

I know -- better than I know I exist -- I know that in those moments when I am captured by you I come alive with wonder and delight and love. Am I driven to escape you by my awe at your infinitude? by my disbelief in the incredible?

-- Disbelief. Forgive me, Love, if I say in my defense that your pursuit of me is so preposterous as to make disbelief almost inevitable.

What am I saying? That my wickedness results from your too-goodness? -- Parish forbid!

I love you.

-- Not as a hero achieves do I love you, but as vapor rises in the morning or the doe goes up in Springtime. The wild intensity of my love for you is -- how say it? -- is an operation of the wild intensity of your love for me. The warm sun operates in the shooting of the greens, the climbing of the doe; operates in the expanding and lifting of the morning vapors.

I love you; how I love you!

Remember how I tried to express this? I for a time said, “How lovable you are!” rather than “I love you!”

You showed me you did not like my extinguishing myself. -- Truth is, you as you love me as me. You do not nirvana me into your infinitude. Without our twoness how can we have love?

So again I say: I love you. I am not, you insist, inert iron nor inert vapor nor dumb animal. It is an “I” who loves the “you.”

How understand these my own contradictions?

Why bother trying?

Oh God I wonder as I love, and question.

You epiphany me then, then when our loves have brought us close. You epiphanied me to know you want me, want “I,” not merely my worship nor devotion: not “how lovable” but “I love.”

Main epiphany: You are three, you the Origin loving, you the Word loving, you the love between them, Spirit. You must be three -- the two and the love; if only one, where is love?

Same or allied: Love is all that matters to you.

-- Adoration, if loving. -- Not “mere” adoration: You do not care to drink in adulation.

-- Righteousness, if loving. -- Not “mere” rectitude (which can be ego-trip). Jesus warns us. Caritas forma virtutuum omnium est.

Here now: Is this too an epiphany, Love? -- To see that when two people forgive each other they make room for renewed love; it is the return of love that makes its preparation, forgiveness, valuable. Thus also, when sinning I confess to you, you “fall all over yourself” rushing to forgive. You totally disregard the magnificence we see in your merciful forgiving; you attend only to the happy removal of the obstacle to our loving. -- Yes, Love, you let me know this is an epiphany, a knowledge-gift from you: Love is all that matters to you.

-- So many, many epiphanies, ah God, cluster round this main!

The primal epiphany is the experience of the reality and intensity of your love for me. At the best of times, your presence becomes like the water to a swimmer -- better, to a fish who breathes water. You so surround and penetrate me and my awareness of you that I do not know where, or whether, my skin or soul-edge separates from you the “me” into my “me-ness” -- do not know and do not care to know. I am not, not standing aside beholding my beholding you; the “watcher” part of me is immersed totally, not in watching, but in you. This totality of experience is not a work of mine -- is not the diver immersing himself by diving into the sea. I do not throw myself into you (given a chance at throwing, I will hurl myself away). You throw yourself; the immersion is the immersion you, Sea, make by engulfing me.

As the earliest embryo contains all the adult’s organs, the sense of possession by you is one experience though reflection sees in it many modes. The sense of my engulfment in your love for me is not a perception of your greatness nor a desire-response to your desirability, nor a rejoicing in your beauty, nor a swearing of loyalty to your goodness -- it is all these, undifferentiated, and more. It is the primal response to you of my soul’s dark and unknowable root, the life-response of the growing center that sends rootlets down and leaves up.

I do not “see” you “embracing” me, do not “feel” you “stroking” me; my mouth is not “made breathless” by your “kiss.” But a mystic analog of all these things really happens, really. No manual of lovers’ joys will come near to supplying enough images to portray in full the reality of our chamber.

Never, otherwise, in any of the world’s fairest experiences, have I sensed myself, this burst of vitality which is my innermost self, in wholeness. A life-time of Earth experiences cannot compare with a moment’s experience of you loving me, of my responding -- the experience not of yours only but of our love.

It is this experience itself in its wholeness -- mind/body, head/heart -- that gives me to say I “know” you.

What could this miserable “I” know of you from a distance, even with the aid of an Alexandrian labyrinth of books?

-- I remember well the famous paragraph in L’Histoire d’une ame where Therese says the same thing.

You epiphany me with the incredible insight that in our love-experience you are involved totally. The God who thrusts this engulfment upon the whole me is the whole Divinity. You are my Creator; I live because your power, wisdom, goodness live in me. You are my Redeemer; I live because the man-God lives in me in his saving me and as food for my salvation. I live because the Spirit lives in me as the Spirit of my love-bonding with God -- that Spirit who is the love-bonding within the sacred Trinity. But I do not go from one to the other of you three persons the way I would go make my devotions of the three altars of an old-fashioned church. I go in love to the One You. I go to the One because you come to me as the One.

And yet -- paradox of the trinity-mystery -- I am free in prayer to address myself to you, the Origin; or to you, the Word; or to you, the Love.

More: There is yet another mode of the totality -- the unreservedness of your giving yourself. If you are creating the world, I also am creating the world. If you are saving souls, I also am saving souls. If you are dying on a cross, I also am dying on a cross. You identify me with yourself in everything you are -- three persons, one God -- and in everything you do you make me one with you.

Oh my God!

When you one me with you, my God, it is sometimes as three: I mean in my experience. When I am one with you, Origin and Creator, I am in love with the Word; the love I become is you, Holy Spirit. When I am one with you, Christ Jesus, Word, I am in love with the Source whom you bespeak; the love I become is you, Holy Spirit. When I am one with you, Holy Spirit, I am in love with the Two; the love I become is You.

Then, most hidden, there are times when you bring me into yourself as Trinity; mirabile dictu, I am one with the One who in loving is Three; I am one with the Three, one with your one love....

-- Bliss incomprehensible....

-- That you should do this....

Sustain me, my God!

Oned with you, I begin to see the others, the throngs of other “I’s” to whom you bind with this love.

I do not run down the canon of saints to find their names. Better if I would scan all the tombstones in all the world through time. But in my rapture I am not rational enough for anything of the kind. -- Many familiar faces, yes; more, unfamiliar. In those great-eyed, open-mouthed faces I see the lostness-in-you I feel in myself. No twinge of jealousy comes, nor questioning of your promiscuity, for we all of us are loved each as one. We have become “trinitied” e pluribus unum. When I am brought into the Three, we are not four but three. When all of us are embraced, we are not n but three. We are all one love as you, God, are one love.

Ah, Wonder!

When I turn to the creation, I see again the splendor of the many in the act of oneing.

-- The ladies who love cats are obliged by the mayor to keep their animals indoors. Free of cats, mice multiply. Among other things, the mice eat up all the beehives. With no bees to pollinate them, flowers and grasses die off. With no grass, the cattle perish... And so on....

-- As I know well, my breath is daily, hourly yielded to me by the trees, and the trees breathe what I exhale.

-- The farthest galaxies exert gravity vectors that steady the Milky Way. In the Milky Way all stars help wheel our star/Sun around but not too close to the galactic center. Our Sun whirls Earth round its orbit along with other planets; Earth whirls me through Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter with all their consequences. Earth spins me morning, noon, evening, night .

Everything in creation gives to everything else. Everything receives.

All things in creation are bound, by their giving and receiving, into one Cosmos. It is the giving/receiving that disestablishes Chaos.

I call this phenomenon -- far more important than entropy -- the operational love of each for all, of all for each. This love is real; it performs a major function in the real world though it is not a love-feeling, not a love-consciousness any more than it is a love-act of free will.

I see that in my experience with God there is operational love at work; my relationship with God, God’s with God, is reflected in the creation. How much of it I feel or am conscious of or freely will -- that is another matter. I sense this profound “rightness” in my God-relationship the way I sometimes gratefully feel my weight gravitating me securely to Mother Earth. Usually, however, I go along as unaware of this primary operational God-love as I am of the basic fact of my security on my planet-- my personal non-chaos.

Usually I refer to less basic realities when I speak of the experience of God-love. I am conscious of his love for me, mine for him; I sometimes (not often) feel my heart warming in love-sentiment, my eyes brightening in love-joy. Primarily, I concur with your gravitating me into you; you pull and I push. This is free will; perhaps the most crucial element in the experience: my conscious choice of you even as I know you enable me to choose you. While falling into you I keep my jet engine going to thrust me into you. Without this cooperating action of mine, there would be no love-joy, no love-warmth; in the end there would be no operational love -- I would fly off into the deep-space aloneness of my personal solitary Hell.

But how can I think now of sin and disorder? My mind is full of the singing and dancing of God-love.

The incomparable experience of the God-love within you, between you and me, between you and all people (and things), between me and all people -- this experience though incomparable I see figured by one of the last remaining liturgies of the religion which anthropology says was probably the primal religious formulation of earliest humankind: the liturgy of the Maypole. The Maypole is seen to spring from Earth like the sprouting of new life. With gratitude the dance celebrates life, joy, the beneficence of the Source of things. Round and round the Maypole early people sing and dance. They love one another; they make love. They respond with love to the love implied in the beneficence they see everywhere.

They circle -- they, we circle the orbit of order that is drawn by love. They center on the Maypole -- the joyous center in all things: love. Yet they dance freely, not in minuet; they cavort, hearts full of gladness and life. The Maypole, the Axis, sheer mystery of life and being to the first peoples, stands for us in the daylight of revelation; in it we see the Three. It is the singing and dancing of the eternal Three that turns and rejoices the dancing round and round.

Indescribable Ring of the Kingdom!

This Ring I see as the ultimate nature of uncreated-created reality. This Ring is the eternity of the perfection of the world to which we all, God and we, aspire.

O God I love you in your splendor!

To us in our Pentecost lightsomeness the Maypole is Christ on his Cross. The Cross no longer kills, restricts, immobilizes him; Christ Glorious bends a Cross glad now to bend with him. -- Not the rigid wood -- the flexible wood like that of the honeysuckle vine, wood that dances with him, breaks out blossoms to cover him in beauty and fragrance. As he draws the wood to his body, he draws all things and all the dancers to his heart. He becomes, in our enlightened eyes, the center of the spinning cosmos, center of the whirlwind of human lives. How happy he is! How happy are you Three! How happy all the dancers!

Ah, love is everything!

I love you, Love, in putting my sins as far away as east is far from west. I love you, Christ, in taking on yourself my sin; you become sin.

It has taken me -- you know so well -- years to accept the magnitude, the profundity, of the unconditional mercy your love extends.

Guilty man now cleansed, black traitor now white as snow, I dare lift my face to the infinitude of yours and thank you. How long the years, how terrible the solitude, when though penitent I did not lift my face!

Having been taught by Therese at age fifteen that “love is everything,” having been drawn joyously into the Ring of dance and song, how could I ever walk away?

Having been re-captured by you through your love and beauty in Nature, why did I refuse to dance your love, sing your beauty?

Having been graced once again into your community of sacrifice and sacrament, having been given the full vision of the Ring of your Kingdom, is it credible I would now betray you, you my paradise?

-- Betray you not once but repeatedly, obstinately, even through these latest years?

Even now as, dying, I write these notes to you, my God, I dread what I might do tomorrow.

For others, the Ring is a whirlpool, mind-changing and soul-transforming; I believe no person in history has so successfully stepped out of it as have I. Treasonous to your love countless times, I am the world’s worst sinner.

Now confessing, I would like to explore with your help, to prevent an evil tomorrow, the evil ways of my success in foiling your love.

The first way that occurs to me is perhaps the worst. You have given me to see that in me guilt has mothered guilt.

-- Because I have been guilty in the past, I tell myself, I dare not lift my face to you in the present. Thus in a pretense of humility I excuse myself from the full commitment of “the leap in the dark”: I add my new treason to old. The devil won little in the first sin, by which I was misdirected toward some incidental; he wins a great victory I this second sin, for he blocks our love, our mutuality, the heart of it all. And most important: In depriving you, Giver and Lover, of myself, I am depriving you of what, short of Trinity, you most crave. My Lord, forgive me; forgive me my guilty guilt.

To me it seems that when I insist on clinging to my guilt after I have been forgiven I have found a wolf-in-sheep’s clothing to cling to: If I should die to myself in every other regard, my guilt gives me something of myself to identify with, something in which the “I” continues to live in its proud aloneness. By giving me to me, by focusing on myself as guilty, instead of giving me to you, I commit a great and pervasive sin.

The lightsome Maypole Ring’s joyous tripping and singing round your presence is the best assurance that I have come up out of the dark cave of this self-pitying guilt. --Alleluia!

The perception that a turning-upon-myself is evil, as in clinging to forgiven guilt-- is, thank you, a gift epiphany from you. You wish me always to throw the dart of my love, of my attention, my concern, into the Cloud of Unknowing. When I in evil affection point my dart at myself, directly or through creatures, I move opposite to your intentions and hopes, to your will. This evil self-turning, I see, is the Luciferian essence of sin; it is the centralmost “I will not serve.”

Perhaps, I say to myself, this foul turning can be seen in the Forbidden Fruit, the apple of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: Adam and Eve certainly knew right from wrong; what the apple promises is a knowledge of what is good for me, not evil in itself. In the pursuit of good-for-self and the avoidance of evil-for-self they will make all things serve them and they will become like gods.

In the cosmos, I think, everything benefits something else, possibly everything else; to receive from the other and to give to the other seems to be the operative nature of all beings, the quintessential of subsistence. When something turns round to feed upon its own tail it destroys itself; it is a cancer upon itself; it rounds itself to zero; it shrinks to nothing.

I see then, Love, that you could brush off our sins and be less troubled than an elephant by fleas; the worst we do is a slight and inconsequential offense to you. What hurts you, what pains you, what brings you to the Cross is your pity for us who deprive ourselves of the joy of your love, who retreat out of the other-blessed and blessing existence you have created and plunge into the absolute nothingness we are in ourselves.

Your tears at Gethsemani, as at Lazarus’ death, were for us.

For me, the injustice I do in rebelling is of slight importance to the frustration I inflict upon your love for me.

And so I see more clearly how you have invited me to live in love and joy. No obstacle can come between us except the guilt of sin; the tremendous greatness of the gift of forgiveness is that it discreates sin. It intends also to discreate guilt and will do so if only I let it -- my “second repentance.”

Likewise, of course, with sisters and brothers: forgive and forget.

Then we go dance and sing!

“No man can serve two masters.” As I progressed in formal education, there grew in me an allegiance to learning that competed with the allegiance to devotion. At the time, I denied this; eventually a choice was forced upon me. Intellectual pride dominated my life. This admission, Lord, as you know, is new.

Just as the appearance of humility helped me hide from the self-serving of guilt, so the claim of excellence helped me hide from the self-serving of the pursuit of knowledge. No doubt knowledge is excellent; what your epiphany has brought me to see is that this does not mean knowledge “excels” other of the human person’s potentials of fulfillment. When I give intellect -- or any of my faculties -- supremacy, I am distorting my nature. The “supreme” thing about human nature in the fully developed person is, as in the cosmos itself, the fabulous network of its givings and receivings. Value, “reality,” in me as in the cosmos is relational in all parts rather than substantive in any one part.

The subtle evil in my “supremizing” my mind has been that I unconsciously and easily effect an ego-identification with it: “I am a supreme mind.” -- Again, the evil face of pride. While I congratulate myself that I do not learn in order to learn more than the next person, nor to compete and win the largest following, nor to create great works like the dukedom of Faust, I am boasting that I am not proud. My evil does not lie in these shallow sordidnesses but in ripping one of your gifts out of the context you have arranged and setting it up above all things -- like an idolater carving an ordinary tree into the shape of a god.

For me, my youthful life of devotional prayer came to seem ragged with imperfections such as sentimentality, improper intimacy, over-confidence in the “inner voice.” It came off very poorly when compared with more knowledgeable and deliberate prayer-forms such as the liturgy and centering prayer. My boyhood following of Therese faltered and came to a halt because I scorned it from my newly achieved height. I cut the hawser of the anchor that held me to you.

Thank you for seeing into my heart, love-God, for I could never tell you in words like these the shame and pain of my confusion. Again and again I ask, how could a person once given the vision allow himself to be deceived by the ego-tricks of his own mind? How terrible of me to spurn you! Yet deeper is the mystery of how you dare trust me again.

The young atheistic humanist takes on the world; he will discover in modern science and philosophy the understanding of the world that credulous Christianity has failed to give him. He begins to doubt that doctoral studies, even the best of them narrow, will help him toward the all-inclusive vision. At the same time the needs of his enlarging family cry out for better support than he is giving them. He gives up formal study and the teaching profession, goes into the business world in personnel management. He makes the break not easily but with bitterness -- how awful to have to give up the goal of a life as a university professor! In self-pity, in private study, he withdraws from the family. Determined he will though without degree someday effect a one-man intellectual revolution, he is blind to the disintegration of his family. Wife and children leave him.

I see now, Lord, by your grace see now how I in the supremacy of my mind gave less and less place to love for those nearest and dearest and see how, pre-occupied with my own manic delusion, I became totally blind to their pains.

Throwing myself more fiercely into study, like a myopic alchemist sealing himself into his cell, I ran through the failing pursuit of an ultimate particle and through existentialist philosophy’s failing of all hope. I came to my angst; I decided to kill myself.

Now, I thank you for this descent into the hell of despair. Then, to live was pain.

I had extirpated from myself the last subtleties of the old faith. Throughout the descent I had assumed what I had come to believe in the days of my sophisticated Christian Humanism: that faith is an assent of the mind. -- What else, the mind being supreme?

Now your epiphany enlightens me: Boyhood faith and, thank you, present faith includes all of me.

My faith is not merely my mind assenting to your truth; it is my heart loving your goodness, my will willing your will, my imagination seeing hidden beauty in you as in a poem, my senses and body singing and dancing the Ring around you. -- Whole me to whole you.

Oh God, it was so brutal of me toward you to tear from your love all of myself but the one part, and that diseased by pride!

Having lost faith in the nature of faith it was not surprising that I lost the faith itself, not only faith in you but faith in the world and in life. When my belief became an ideology, it began to die, it died in terrible lostness.

You let me see now that my faith is the leap of my entire person into your arms: Though you slay me, I will trust in you. In a mind-supremacy false “faith,” I dared put a hundred catechetic or theologic pages ahead of a hundred minutes in the presence of the Cross.

-- Holy Cross: I see the flowers blossoming! I hear you in your love-victory leading the song!

Please let me once more confess -- as I have again and again and will again and again -- the greatest of all my sins: the crushing of love, of loved people, under the supremacy of my mind.

I badly hurt the family you had given me to love me and be loved by me. Self-engrossed, paying less and less attention to them, I “worked” at my grand schemes in a remoteness that made it impossible for me to see they thought I loved them no longer, to see developing in them wounds of love-betrayal that were becoming mortal, beyond healing. When I returned to the Church thirty-five years later and looked for them hoping for some degree of reconciliation, so severe was their trauma that they could not respond or did so in courageous pain. All my children and my wife have spent their lives in emotional handicap because of my betrayal. -- For this, more than for anything, I beg forgiveness.

I suffer with them now; each time -- often -- I think of them, I hurt.

I see more clearly the central reality was not a withdrawal into mind but into self, the mind a “noble” mask for ugly selfishness.

For I found time in my life then to play the game of corporate advancement; I made of my business career a “solid” gratification of ego, rising to senior executive level before leaving. -- So lauded at work, how could I notice the chill at home?

I found time also to flirt with women, stopping at bars or going out at night and staying late. I flirted teasingly; often the excited woman would signify readiness for bed, then I would walk away, inflated in macho. -- Brutal “successes” helped blind me to failure in the family.

How was it possible for me, Lord, to become such a monster of self-centeredness and remain unaware?

How has it been possible, oh God, for you to forgive this person who had arrived at a disposition directly contrary to your will and your way, contrary to himself as he had blossomed in early grace? Who will ever sound, my God, the depth of the mystery of your mercy?

You have let me see that mind played the role only of mask for self. I flipped on other masks as I pleased: the hard-working employee; the sex-deprived victim of puritan upbringing and society. In fact, I see now that all wrongs I commit are only so many masks for the one genuine reality: the self exerting itself to gratify itself regardless of the evils brought upon others or the heartbreak brought to you. All my sins are declarations of the supremacy of self. Instead of turning toward the other in giving and receiving as all things rightly do and as my own psyche is designed to do, I turn in upon myself: I feed on my tail, become the zero.

Oh Lord, how dare you give such a person freedom? How in your infinite goodness can you allow this hateful discreativity to persist?

In these last days, overwhelm me with grace to make self the nothing that it is, make love the everything that it is.

Once you had me see that all wrong-doing is one same self-seeking and that all good action is one same loving, it became less important for me to sort out and understand the seven major virtues and the seven capital sins. Were I to write a Christian epic it would not be scaled like Langland’s Dowell, Dobet, and Dobest, nor layered like Dante’s descending and ascending circles. In my imagination, you, Lord Jesus, would be bull in the china shop -- like the ploughman, Piers. You smash all our laddered shelves; in the ruins you stand alone, your presence demanding our acceptance or rejection.

What in confrontation with you I am compelled to do is search myself, my inward hidden workings, for the deepest springs: What in my life is being lived for love of you, what for love of self? I must beware my many masks. -- Do I go to Mass because it is a “good thing”? (I like to congratulate myself on doing “good things.”) Or do I go to unite with you in sacrifice? -- Am I respectful toward the bishop because this is the approved behavior or because I see in his shepherding your shepherding? Do I allow myself to be indignant at people who do not serve me in my illness because they are not doing their jobs right? Or, knowing it is not better to be right than kind, do I forgive them for their mistakes, and forget?

If I am doing anything at all for social approval rather than for you -- washing up in the morning -- I am doing wrong. Approval is ego-tripping.

Mainly, mainly, mainly, I find my hidden betrayals of you undo the masks which defend me against the intimacy and intensity of your love. -- “I am too great a sinner to be close to you.” -- “Pious devotions do not accord with intellectual integrity.” -- “Love is sentiment; sentiment misleads.” -- “I am far too small to be the focus of the Almighty.”

Will I never learn that all my evil masks are one: the suit of armor that saves me from your seductive caress.

-- Here, if anywhere, Love, is where I know you. Let no one ask me how. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the loving God. If the sea fell in love with a sea shell and tried to fill it with itself, the shell would be broken into infinitesimal fragments indistinguishable from the sand. When he tries to fill me with himself I dread annihilation -- no -- I’m not sure whether it’s “annihilation” or even if it’s “dread.” I am like a balloon being filled beyond capacity; the stretching pains me like fire. But no matter how incontainable or painful, I love your loving: You are all joy. I have not become heroic in the bearing of pain; with your love and joy you give my soul strength.

Before and after, the dread is real. The farther from the experience I am, the more readily would I forego it because of the dread. This is where I am not only humanly weak but perhaps culpable. Perhaps the agony of Gethsemani was the agony of the human containing the divine love-gifts, God offering to die for humankind. Perhaps the height of his agony on the cross was the agony of containing of, not the offering of, the full act of God’s love -- history’s supreme love-statement, the act of love which redeems the world and round which the world turns. Perhaps Mary’s sword was this too, this impossible containment: For she knew exactly the love-nature of what her son was doing. Perhaps this is the pain shared by Francis, by Teresa of Avila, by many mystics known and unknown. They speak of the sword or the flames or both.

It is your power, of course, which keeps me whole, unsplintered; your love that fills me with a joy greater than the worst ache.

-- Thank you, thank you, Lover-God!

Have mercy on me. For this is where I am not only humanly weak but culpable because of my dread. At any distance, if I think of it, not only would I forego your love but I am strongly inclined to evade it through becoming busy, preferably with “good” things. Afterward, I cannot of course remember much of the love-experience but what glimmerings I have I try to forget lest my doors should once again fly open to you.

Lord, how can I be so ungrateful, so rude to your advances? I am certain if you gave these same graces to others they would produce for you six saints. Why, why do you waste yourself on me?

For me, it seems the dying-to-self you ask of all of us is not the death “achieved” by uprooting sinful tendencies and developing virtues. Perhaps for me it is the dying of a mere man offering to accept you in your terrible divine loving.

-- Help me, Lord Jesus; you God-man who show me the way, help!

Plea for Mercy on My Helplessness

I plea for your mercy on my weakness; I do not do what I want to do; I do what I do not want to do. Time and again you have broken through my defenses, but a thousand more times have I succeeded in holding you at bay. I remain the proud, often nasty person I was in my atheism. I remain readily irritated, readily offended, readily depressed.

The Ring of joyous life and love never departs from my consciousness, thrust it deeper into my dark and deeper as I may. Why do I evade the bliss? Is it because on the deepest level I fear annihilation?

Here I beg, I beg you to forgive me what I am about to say. I do not raise the fist in anger at you -- not quite. It is you who give me the divine aspiration. Who gives my nature the inert weightiness that prevents my rising? If I am too leaden to be lifted (except rarely) by your love-power, what can I do? What can I be expected to do? Yes, now let me express my secret black thoughts: Do you merely tease us and then let us fall back into our fate as in Greek tragedy?

Oh my God whom I love, how can I blaspheme you so? -- What strange pain my sacrilege generates in me -- a pain inverse to the love-pain: a pain of distancing.

In theory it is my free sinfulness, not my fixed nature, that keeps me away from your arms. I find this hard to accept for I have repented seven times seventy times.

(Feeling the lifting of the fist, I am frightened.)

I am forced to accept the unacceptable: My repentances have been themselves masks. When have I truly, truly -- profoundly and totally -- died to self for you? Have I not congratulated myself on my repentance?

Pity me, Lord, pity me, for truly, profoundly, totally I desire you. Do I secretly also desire self? Oh God!

Miserere mei!

Why am I a merely occasional visitor to the Ring? Why do I not live there?

I feel the lifting of the fist and beg for mercy. I am frightened I may be testing your very goodness.

For excuses, excuses throng my mind.

First (whether first I do not know) let me remind you -- me remind you! -- that I was raised and educated as a citizen of the Enlightenment. Parents and teachers were nineteenth century people; many had not yet heard of the paradigm-smashing of Freud and Einstein in 1905. The supremacy of mind came to me as naturally as the ABCs. Then when you attack, you attack at my affective side, not my intellectual side.

Conscientiously I studied Thomas Aquinas; I disregarded his own evaluation of his Summa: straw. I did not by this come closer to you, as I had been encouraged to believe. Rather, I strengthened my fortifications.

The ABCs themselves made me hyper-literate: I came to trust that all knowledge, all truth, can be conceptualized, verbalized. The literacy of Western Europe, more than any other might have, severed me from the roots of my sophia in sensory and affective experience. I understand that in Chinese the word wen, for wisdom, science, knowledge, derives from the word wen meaning bird-tracks as in dust or snow: This suggests to the Chinese unconscious that bird-tracks themselves, which art-drawn characters resemble, can convey knowledge as does written language. In Sumerian, the glyph for woman looked like a vagina. -- The verbal did not entirely wipe out the sensory.

Most traditional-society people, like the unspoiled Native American, live their hours in a stream of consciousness of responses to direct physical and affective realities. Most West-dominated people live their hours in a stream of consciousness of derived concepts. Reality bridges out to you, Lord -- ideas (of reality?) bridge into self.

Behold, oh God, the handicap in which I was born!

There is more: I am born handicapped not only by my ancestry of the last four centuries but by a parentage of about four millennia going back to the Cain who invented agriculture and built cities. He murdered the Abel-life, the sensory life of intimacy with animals, the forest, the savanna. To the unclouded traditional mind, as in Australia, Nature herself is the dancing and singing of the primal Beneficence. It was their grateful joy which prompted such people’s creation of the original earthly Maypole ring. But the new skills and accomplishments of the Cain-mind cut people off from their primal source. The rise of the great world religions, all at about the same time, became almost inevitable. In these theologies, people, failing (because “de-natured”) to see God all round (the “Everywhere Spirit”), found him in a high and remote Heaven. Some kept in touch with Earth and life, but many turned more and more to death and an after-life. You in your goodness made sure your Chosen People found you not only in a transcendent heaven but in an immanent here and now -- as in the psalms, as in David dancing naked before the Ark. Furthermore, you promised to send down from “heaven” a redeemer of earthly flesh and blood.

It seems to me that at least partly this Earth tradition among the Hebrews experienced drastic dilution among Christians, students of Greeks and Romans and heirs to Persian Manichaeism. The Enlightenment, birthed by Scholasticism, had had a long gestation. Thus, my cultural ancestry handed to me not only the “enlightened” primacy of mind but an ancient negative force that seriously depressed my natural abilities to learn through concrete experience, sensory and appetitive.

-- I’m sorry, my Lord, to have gone to such lengths in this matter, like a windy attorney piling words on words to build his case.

In our time Therese breaks through; she re-discovers that love is everything. I am one of thousands, of millions, who did not break through the heaped centuries (until you yourself cracked my shell). Yes, I am making my case. -- How dare I? What case can I build to exonerate myself from refusal to respond to your love?

Have mercy on my anger. -- Anger at you?!

Have mercy on my helplessness in tragic circumstance.

Second, if this can be second -- oh God spare my effrontery! -- is your own circumstance. Are you too tragic? There are post-moderns who are sorry for your failure to make us believe.

For me this near-demonic question takes this form: Is it impossible for you, the Infinite, somehow to approach me small -- limited and restrained? Is it impossible for you to give me a little love at a time, finitely? Thus you might gradually lead me from warmth to heat to the incineration of union -- (incineration not real but dreaded). You might gradually lead me from darkness into pre-dawn and on into fuller and fuller dawn before bursting upon me in sunrise. Your whole brilliance threatens not only to blind me but to obliterate me.

Is it impossible for you to practice a golden mean?

Are you, God, as unable to stoop comfortably to me as I am unable to leap comfortably to you?

Must you hold firm to your demand that I return to the innocence of Abel as prerequisite for soaring to your Holiness?

Oh God, how close have I come to blaming you for my defections! Mercy, mercy! Choirs of saints and angels, intercede for me!

The mark of Cain is white skin, I fear, my Lord. His descendants, more skilled than other peoples in crafts such as the use of bronze, the manufacture and use of the wheeled chariot, poured out of the Caucasus and swept through the Indo-European world. Among the conquered they set themselves up as a dominant class; they walled unwalled cities like Knossos against competing Aryan cousins and against their own subjects. They brought with them (before the Great Religions) a rather petty pantheon which forced underground the primary numinous religion of joy and gratitude. That religion had usually taken the form of the Great Goddess and her consort -- a pair -- divinity. Primeval beliefs and practices survived; some were grudgingly given place in the pantheons: Demeter and Bacchus; Parvati and Siva. In all the Indo-European civilizations there developed an antipodal psyche -- Apollo trying to dominate Dionysus and, in respectable circles, winning. More numerous and successful in Europe than in India, the Aryans became variously Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Celts and later-arriving “barbarians.” In modern times they committed pogrom after pogrom upon people after people across the world, devastating them physically, culturally, politically. Hated, the whites, especially the Americans, have become the objects of terrorism. Their dominant minority having shrunk to ten percent of Earth’s population, it is unlikely their brutal civilization will survive much longer.

How can I make of these terrible times an excuse for refusing you? -- I become busy fretting over the waste of my life. Though returning in old age to faith, I can yet do something, something. I fall victim again to the illusion I can become a one-man revolution, this time a Christian revolution. I must commit my knowledge and talents to the barricades.

-- Old man, bow your head and pray.

No. I must be about “my father’s” business.

The siren call I hear is not to save civilization, certainly not to help Aryans escape justice. -- It is to help, if I can, brothers and sisters the world over, and especially in my own country, who have forgotten love, who are crucifying one another. I have known the agony of aloneness in an empty universe, the fatuousness of run, run, running, of purchasing and partying. My heart goes out. I see the year-by-year heightening of their anxiety and defensive callousness in an apparently collapsing social order.

These Aryan friends, like me, are victims of their failed Enlightenment and victims of their (others’) millennial abuses of the techno power derived from Supreme Mind. I know the exploiters suffer more profoundly than the exploited, the torturers than the tortured. They no longer live in quiet desperation; they survive by making their own torments worse. They try to make more noise without than their pain makes within.

They scorn their nihilist CEOs but support them by working for them and rushing to buy their goodies. In all their half-sleepless dreams, each one of them, I think, knows the dark holds terrors, knows the terrors are after him.

-- God, have today’s children of Adam put themselves into this living nightmare? Has society? Have you?

How can I take flight to you from them?

I am now too old and unwell to undertake an apostolic career. The only thing I can see to do is to write about the intimacies and hopes of prayer.

Much of my distractedness these years since my return have been occasioned by strenuous efforts to write for my tragic sisters and brothers a book in the form of a novel about your incredible love, about hope in you and intimacy with you. But I am no novelist. Up one blind alley after another, I have immersed myself in revision after revision. -- Until told I am dying. Then I see how deluded I was, how consuming an obsession my pride bred in me.

Are you angry with me?

But please listen: I cannot help the world in misery, not I.

Why do you not help?

If I could tell them “Love!” they would ask: “Who loves us? -- Who cares? Who sees any sign of love?”

I would be no better than a Don Quixote tilting dreamily with their real-life charges against you. But you could give signs.

Where are you for them?

How can I not be on their side?

God forgive! Group: Signs for Me

In the Glass Trees, you gave me sign.

After my non-suicide, it was my new wife’s enthusiasm for Spring gardening that began to thaw my freeze. Also I read as though it were news the thesis of Joseph Wood Krutch holding that intuition has validity. For instance, he said we all have the unshakable intuition, in the face of narrowly rational people like the behaviorists, that our consciousness is a reality. -- These small developments loosened my rigidities, opened me.

When I saw the Glass Trees I did not dismiss them. Though later I misinterpreted the “phenomenon,” then the experience itself, like an experience of blinding light or searing fire, left no room whatsoever for uncertainty.

One sunny morning driving to school I saw trees, a stand of woods just beyond a fresh-plowed potato field, turn as it were to glass. Typical Long Island oaks with a few pitch pines, the yet-leafless oaks gave up for me the opacity of their bark; I saw into them. Not only bark but cambium and ringed wood let me see in, in even into their corelessness. It was as though they showed themselves to me not only transparent but hollow, not only hollow but empty of being. Yet on the contrary they showed me their actual, real beauty, the wonder of their treeness.

I pulled over and stopped, stared.

Gradually the emptiness of each glass tree glowed with a beingness not its own, a beingness that “exuded” the being of the tree, a beingness totally other than but not without relationship with this tree that, sight returning to normal, would prove common, recognizable, familiar. The unfamiliar, uncommon, previously unrecognized, “foreign” beingness -- I saw in the compulsion of seeing, not in the politeness of deducing -- saw like a wire frame upon which the “artificial” tree had been wrapped and constructed. No; no wire. I saw nothing in the core of the tree, in the cores of the branches, branchlets, twigs: -- no wire, nothing -- a no-thing: a beingness beyond all our categories of “things”: a beingness for which (whom?) the word beingness is itself a misnomer.

Rapidly, the innermost “non-being” in which the tree had being began to shine like crystal transformed by sunlight. The glow became splendor -- not overwhelming but observer-friendly splendor. It was of the non-color of pure sunlight yet it carried a pale jewel-like tint of greenness as good crystal carries glints of blue-gold. It was only in the tree-pattern of this green-hue that I could still recognize the treeness of the tree. The tree had become like the filament of an incandescent light.

I knew -- don’t ask how -- that I was beholding the coming-into-being of things. -- Not “coming” in the time-sense but in the radical timeless sense of being versus not-being. The immanence-transcendence that generates things I “knew” better than I knew the trees or other derivatives. Not then, but later, I realized that I had experienced the “ground of being.”

From that Spring morning I have had access every day of my life to living in the dramatic awareness of creation happening now. (That I have not always attended is another matter.)

Teaching that day I stood two feet off the floor; I walked two feet off the ground when I came home and saw the gardens, the sloped hillside, the shining bay and the sea. The “sensory” quality of the vision -- images dulled with time but the “understanding’ of it did not.

-- Except in two respects. A total-person experience, the adventure tended to become a mental event, a new “mind set” in the grip of my mortally wounded but surviving mind-predominance. By the time I told my philosopher brother, he called it “the experience of being.”

Second, less awarely, but more importantly, I lost “sight” of a feeling for the emotional, affective power of the event. I had experienced beauty and beneficence as vividly as truth. The Beingness gave the trees to the trees in love; in love the Beingness gave the trees to me. -- And the wondrous vision.

-- You, oh Lover -- had once again assailed my proud walls. You had made a breach.

Years would go by before I would admit you.

Lord, forgive me.

Sign: Seduction

The next sign consisted of many signs: Nature’s beauties and wonders.

Moving from western Long Island and its New York City suburbs to the East End renewed the long-dormant love of Nature that had so flourished during my Missouri boyhood.

Fish-shaped Long Island’s head, occupied by Brooklyn and Queens, stares across the narrow East River at Manhattan. -- Of the Island’s 125 miles, the 75 miles east of suburbia’s 50 open out into farming, fishing, and tourist country. The land itself breaks into endless bays and wetlands; it thrusts two lengthy flukes -- Paumanok’s fishtail -- into the Atlantic.

Living on the South Fork and teaching at a college, I also taught at high schools on both forks; my wife and I loved to drive the back roads and to go boating on all the bogs. I got to know the East End in its quietly surprising beauty, its dramas of sea-land encounter, its relatively unspoiled woods and waters. I enjoyed the humor of fiddler crabs at the edge of a tidal creek, the coy but curious white tail deer spying large-eyed from upland undergrowth, snow-tracks in winter including the angel-wings of the swooping great horned owl.

I found, in cool woods, the white bells of bear berry hiding close to the ground, the spooky nightshade, ghostly Indian pipe; yellow mallows in the salt meadow and sea lavender’s softly burning bush of pale purple; or the ponds, water lilies and pond lilies, the floating masses of “water cloves” and, smallest of flowering plants; in sand, yellow-blooming prickly pear, towering yucca; in clearings the yellow bouquet of wild indigo -- and altogether a wild flower garden second only to Missouri and the flower-famous Great Smokies.

I’m sorry to litany you with all this, Lord, but the memory of things brings them back to me, brings back the delight. I could name the birds too, name the stars thronging the ocean-cleared air, the finds of beachcombing...so many and such fascinating memories!

For ten years nearly every morning I got myself up to my pagoda on the roof of the house we had designed. -- Down the long bay between the two forks, in a view eastward out toward the open sea, the waking world reappeared from near-absolute blackness as though each morning were creation’s first.

You often allowed the crystal vision to renew itself in these encounters with wondrous and beautiful things. It became “natural” for me to see in creation the Creator.

The Supreme Mind, however, not admitting it was in retreat, devised an escape by insisting that not only was the vision philosophic rather than religious, but that my “religious” -- so-called -- associated feelings, like awe, wonder, delight, thankfulness for beneficence, were so much sentimentality and no more: unworthy, undignified, unmanly.

I oscillated between reproving myself for gratifying childish yearnings and reproving myself for betraying genuine experience.

This contradictory state grew in intensity through the years. Neither the believing nor the disbelieving pole won out over its opposite. In the believing spells I became more and more certain the Beneficence is a Person, the Person is a Lover, the Lover is a Seducer; in unbelief I mocked myself almost hysterically.

After my wife died I spent winters in Southwest Florida, near the Everglades, Bold Cypress and the undeveloped Ten Thousand Islands off shore. Also I took to canoeing, which gave me a new and most fruitful access to Nature up and down the east coast, Adirondacks to Gulf.

In Florida, especially by gliding silently over the waters, I discovered the incredible richness of plant life, animal and bird life, in the sub-tropics. I loved the great birds in their vast flocks: egret, ibis, brown pelican and white, spoonbill, frigate bird, blue heron and green. -- Dense hundreds upon hundreds. At first touring with ranger guides then on my own, I paddled up rivers, around ponds, between mangrove-choked islands. I penetrated some of the islands in my little one-person craft, tunneling the island mangroves along narrow and shallow streams through tight-laced low foliage; on the islands’ mangrove-walled pools I floated where a pink ibis might tolerate my silent presence or a water snake wave its head weaving away without hurry.

In time I learned to approach alligators as close as they would allow me; when one decided I had come too close, he would signal me by splashing water with one paw or threshing his body; none attacked.

I learned to approach dolphins; sometimes they came and played with me. One day a pair (it was mating time), playing close, swam to the canoe from opposite sides; under water they banged the hull simultaneously. -- How much forethought had gone into this? For if they had not struck simultaneously or if both on one side, they would certainly have capsized me. Exhilarated I raised my double paddle as they swam off and turned, giving me eye contact. I cried “Hurrah!” They came back, repeated their stunt. How wonderful of them!

With scores of others on the beach I watched the spectacular sunsets over the Gulf. Spectacular too, magnificent cumulus clouds -- largest I’d ever seen -- daily formed their multi-roundednesses and sailed in dignity across the blue and peaceful sky.

Back on the East End in my trailer home on the unpolluted Peonic River, marvels hardly less marvelous than Florida’s delivered upon me the not-subtle “blows” of your love. For in every beauty and wonder you made it clear to me you were at my door with your bouquet of roses, your box of candy.

Too crippled to withstand the increasingly obvious, Supreme Mind became cracked and broken, allowing your light and warmth to enter. I did my best -- forgive me! -- to bolster the walls but I failed. It was not that the stars became your eyes, the breeze your caress, but nearly. They became more than eyes, more than caresses, more than figures: They were your power and beauty -- above all your passion -- passion focused upon me.

The notion of a generalized beneficence faded, became lost and forgotten in the vivid torrent of the experience of your passion.

The more passionate the you I saw, the more desperate became my struggles to escape.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not evade the simple truth that everything around me -- ordinary as well as extraordinary, shouted -- joyously and wildly -- your love. You threatened to become a God of such reckless ardor you would make yourself unbelievable. You speared me on every blade of grass. You yourself, strengthened my last barricade: How could I submit to a seduction so preposterous, a seduction so patently a wish-fulfilling dream?

-- Listen to me! Blaming you!

O Lord, O Lord, have mercy on me for the innumerable temporary successes of my defiance of your care for me. Earlier, I had scoffed your love embodied in wife and children; that sin, its effects enduring, has always burdened me with grief for them and disgust with myself. Yet earlier, I had allowed King Intellect to dismiss Therese’s little way as immature and sentimental. At this time -- a time measured in years -- I fought you off directly, hand to hand, one might say. Sacrilege! I very nearly won. I would have save for your infinite mercy, save for the prayers of once-loved Mother Mary and sweetheart Therese, also those of my sainted mother and my brother and sister. -- The strength of my resistance indicates the monstrosity of my ego.

Yet even all this you have put away as far as east is from west!

In this story -- why am I telling you all this that you know and understand far better than I? -- Perhaps you want me to “see it steadily, see it whole.” -- See the imperative, in my life-progression, of your desire for me.

-- In this story, the usual “mental,” “verbal,” interpretation of a sign becomes progressively more inadequate, not to say ludicrous. It may be admissible to see rabbit-tracks as “sign” that a rabbit has passed by; to me it is not admissible to speak of a rabbit as a “sign” of Nature’s vitality and fecundity -- the rabbit here, unlike the information in the first instance, is a physical reality, a living animal, a fertile parent. The rabbit here is Nature being vital, being fertile: We cannot, except at our peril, reduce a world-contained reality to a mind-contained concept. Yes, it is true we make this artificial reduction often in thinking or communicating: We do this, I say, at our peril. Much, much has been lost, I think, by our failure to compensate through direct experience for taking this dangerous short cut toward the management of things. Probably no single development has more enabled the primacizing of Mind than this habit of conceptualizing into ourselves, without affective counterbalance, the realities outside ourselves.

Increasingly, Nature’s beauties and wonders have brought me -- not signals, not communications, not information about your power and wisdom and goodness; no -- they have brought me experiences of your goodness and wisdom and power present and at work: I experience you loving. It is as though -- it is not exactly but it is as though you, my God, show me your face in a honeysuckle flower as Jesus showed his face to his disciples.

At length you gave me a “sign” so substantive, so real, so alive there was never any thought of a “message” or “meaning” riding like a separate entity upon the back of “mere matter”: For at this point it is a person who enters my life.

“Seductress,” I could call her, though I had known her a while and had let her know I could love her “too much.” In the canoe, when we beached on a creek bank in the woods, without warning she turned round and embraced me. I returned her demonstrations of affection and desire and delight. Within days we had become lovers.

We loved each other, I believe, as persons. Our sexuality became a whole-person vehicle of expression, a person-passion flaming and unrestrained. We made love in my home, in her home, in my camper, in the woods. Though never ceasing to express our personal love, our love-games became more frequent, more prolonged, more inventive, more free and thus more and more ecstatic. I discovered my sexuality, my sex organ, as an “other” within me. She and I allowed our beautiful “others” to gallop headlong upon each other, tournamenting into trumpetings and snapping flags and cheers. We thanked you, we glorified you regardless of not understanding.

After six months of romance, she came to realize, and persuaded me, that, peak experience though this had been, we were not mutually suited for a long-time relationship.

It had been with blind faith in you that I had abandoned myself in this adventure of the heart and flesh. Though sometimes I felt I had strayed far from the road on which you had been leading me, a deep “gut feeling” drove me forward. I never doubted you would make use of these experiences though I could not imagine how; I questioned especially -- ex-Jansenist -- the pleasure.

In subsequent months, though still not understanding, I became more solidly convinced that the new world I had learned I had learned because you knew my need. How sweet of you to choose so delicious a way of teaching me! -- I have thanked you many times and thank you again, especially for her continuing friendship.

Only seven months after we last made love, you, victorious, dragged me, still kicking, into your Maypole Ring.

-- In what sense, if any, was this love “sign”? How is it conversion took place so soon after?

-- Through these last years, that love-experience remains a diamond too hard to penetrate but always glinting from its countless facets significances without end.

The most immediate significance was the most obvious: Now in my own life I have experience of the fury of human love; now I possess within myself what I dare call an image and likeness of your passion for me, for your world. “God made humankind in his own image and likeness; male and female he made them.”

At once, of course, unregenerate Mind springs upon a new defense -- the very comparison is indecent, blasphemous.

Here began a long wrestling, scarcely subsiding even now, between bold and clear imaging of your ardor and my own and my culture’s anti-flesh heritage. On the one side were the many suggestive passages in the writings of mystics and in the Scriptures, especially the Song of Songs. On the other were my dread of possibly offending you, accentuated by my deep and ancient involvement in anti-sexuality attitudes.

I read into Manichaeism and its parent, the Persian religion of Zarathustra; I found a God-Satan relationship very like that portrayed in Job, found that the structure of the Job book is probably borrowed from Persian literature. In Job we are given a sublime lesson in acceptance of what we cannot understand; we are given, however, no suggestion of the redemptive potential of pain and “evil” that is to be found in the prophets, the psalms, and in the story of Christ. I found that though Zarathustra did not, his followers did “deify” the Satan-figure, beginning a long tradition of the war between equally powerful principles of good and evil, principles that became simplified into the immaterial versus material “forces” in creation, the spirit and the flesh. Persian nobility passed this dichotomous version to visiting or conquered nobility, affecting most of the Indo-European upper classes. Athens’ Alcibiades is an example portrayed by Plutarch. The Greek, especially Platonic, dichotomous thinking seems thus to owe to Persia; many educated early Christians were well prepared for Man and predisposed toward him.

The progress of the Puritanical tradition through the ages is well known but it is far from adequately understood or evaluated.

My own Jansenism, I saw at this time, had been a greater enemy of our love than I had realized, for it repressed not only sexuality but the senses -- much of my love and knowledge of you had come from sensory experiences of Nature. Furthermore, by positing guilt through my very physicality, it weighed against my lifting my face to you, against the confident intimacy you clearly desire.

Additional readings, especially into Tantrism in India and elsewhere, helped me realize that for millions a positive attitude toward sex, not our negative attitude, is felt to be the natural human response. Furthermore, Tantrics have seen in human sexuality possibilities of religious experience that we seem never to have discovered.

This progress toward a better understanding of sexuality in itself and in its role as metaphor of our relationship -- and your in-Trinity relationship -- has matured only recently. In those few months after the “romance,” I hung on “by my teeth” -- in spite of clouds of personal and ancient misgiving -- to the conviction my sexuality was a blessing.

Looking back, the main blessing of the romance seems to have been its opening -- violent opening -- of my soul to the reality of your passionate love.

Once I admitted the fury of your love, my last defenses collapsed.

Yes, yes, O Lord, yes, bless you! You provided sign after sign for me along my unbelieving way. In the same darkness that engulfs my brothers in unbelief, my brother and sister believers who do not believe (like me in those early descending years), you set lamps to my feet. -- Wait: How can I imply that now I am a believer? Now when I remain endlessly angry at you in your loved ones???

How was I any different from or better than -- how am I? -- university brothers and sisters who, everywhere in my America, “rise above” “mere” Earth? How was I different from or better than fellow “rational” Christians, who, as did our founding fathers, thrive in a cultural ethos blind to mystery -- to Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption-- to sin and salvation -- to unbelievable love?

My heart goes out to them. Now a stranger to them, I don’t want to be a stranger. I am one of them; I spent most of my adult life among them. I love them.

My God, what an ache this is! What are you doing to me?

Better men and women than I ever was have sniffed out something of your fragrance in the faint tracks you have made upon Oriental literatures of long ago. -- Or your delicate fragrance in the austere cosmos reached by advanced new sciences. A great poet finds “something that will suffice” in the fact that we are so made as to be able to help create creation: It is in my eyes the skies go blue. They cherish these small treasures which they have found after years of good will and determined search. But what about the common man? And what about people like the me I was -- weak in will, weak in persistence?

In a life overwhelmed by technology and artificiality, who ever sees your dawn? How few ever see your bountiful stars? -- Though filling our lives with one another, who has time to see in human nature our desperate need for the infinite? Who takes time to explore the human condition with the help of Scripture or Augustine or of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Sophocles? -- Taught that philosophizing is word-games, who wastes effort on the mystery of sheer existence, on primal beneficence? -- Who today knows our yesterdays? Who now retains awareness of the enduring human search for ultimate reality, a search which runs steady through the ages in spite of regularly collapsing civilizations? Today, people are drowned in the cataract of the daily, the quotidian. -- Who can blame us for finding no sign?

Oh God have mercy!

Why no sign for others?

Why so many for me?

“As one whom a mother caresses, so will I comfort you; you shall be carried at the breasts, and upon the knees they shall fondle you” (Isaiah 66:12-13).

Paul: My grace is sufficient for you; the weaker you are, the more the power of my love shines through.

We do not know what it is right to pray for. The Spirit himself pleads with sighs too deep for words.

Fate or sin?

When I focus on the gifts you have poured on me I feel “outside” the illusioned and suffering American fellowship (above? God forbid!), but in more stable moments, I realize of course I am still, as always, one of the fellowship for better or worse. Somehow, when I think of Americans as “those out there,” I can commiserate with them as victims of overwhelming circumstances. But when I think of them as the “us” that includes me it’s a different story. For I know my own case -- during my years apart from you I was no helpless victim; I “made” myself what I was through a series of decisions.

For instance, in pursuing so assiduously my unfaith search for an “explanation” of life and the universe, I accepted the Enlightenment assumption that the final answers would be rationalistic. This assumption was not forced on me, I realize now; I chose to embrace it. I chose to disregard the many anti-rationalistic prophets who spoke out -- voices like those of Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Whitman, Muir. I made this choice because I wanted to justify my coronation of reason. It was I myself who blinded my eyes to people who remained true to goodness and beauty, value, transcendence. How can I say brothers and sisters who made the same choice for the same reason are without fault?

So also regarding Nature. During most of my adult life I chose to live in cities or their suburbs, for “convenience,” enduring with little complaint their skies colorless daytime and nighttime, their monotony of year-long non-seasons. It is not destiny -- and not I, alone, but we -- it is we ourselves who have chosen above God’s Nature-signs our supermarket oratories and our shopping-mall temple compounds. Further, in lucid moments of honesty we agree it is not the profiteering corporations that have turned us into mere consumers; it is we who, having chosen our consumerism addiction, maintain the corporations that provide our kicks. -- Just as we carefully elect a government by wimps rather than by leaders who would demand of us self-sacrifice. We consider the minuteman a fool for being willing to leave off his own affairs to serve the community. Yes it is Americans -- I among them -- who have made America what it is. -- What place pity, for us fat consumers? -- Only for our victims.

-- Wait. Where then is charity for my brothers and sisters? Where is compassion for them?

How confused I become!

Lord, help me.

How can I stand with them without crying out with them, “God, you have let us down!”

God, why don’t you give us signs that we can see? If you give Barnabus signs he can see, why not us? What good are signs we cannot see?

Why have you abandoned us, oh God?

The Romans and Jews who put nails in your hands and feet -- you, Christ, prayed your Father to forgive them for they did not know what they are doing. How can you say we know any better than they?

For instance: Your people tell us our childhood Christmas lists were un-Christian. We should have written lists of gifts to give our brothers and sisters on the block, not gimme-lists. But we wrote the lists we were brought up to write.

It is true that many of us, after a long life of service to self and our desires, end up unhappy on our heap; we admit (rarely aloud) the wisdom of the few who told us from the beginning the hollowness of things. Far from being grateful for the message we turn bitter against you for its ineffectiveness. We charge that you have allowed the witchery of life’s illusions to trick us. We claim we are so many more Macbeth-fools. We are so many more of the hopeless people huddled round Hope’s tables while iceman Larry looks on with eyes cold as stars. -- Your stars.

When your people come round trying to tell us your good word is Love, we choke; we would laugh if we had a laugh left in us. You can of course understand we see little or no love on Earth. We have not the slightest expectation you will understand we see no love whatsoever coming down from Heaven.

Signs? Your world is one mass of anti-signs screaming your hard heartedness or nonexistence.

Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. How can I have written what I have just written?

How dare I voice these blasphemies? Mine once, I say they are not mine now. -- How sure am I?

Oh God, I am in their shadow -- my shadow.

More profoundly than I knew, I am one of them -- one of us.

Almighty one I throw myself down before you; I beat my head on the floor.

I will climb Whitney and from the summit shout to all my fellows.

Up here, cold, cold. Blinding snow. Wind -- whine, wind -- scream. -- Never the playful voice of a mocking bird, never the heart-wrenching wails of wolves. Rock; ice. Yes, an anchor, this tilted table top, for the Sierra Arctic. Except for a few weeks of mid-summer melt, here could begin a glacier extending the length of the range. -- Now we are never far from glaciation.

Through shreds in the ragged blizzard I see my land, my fellows. Near, the Great Valley, the Pacific. When I turn, the desert basin, the Rockies, the plains and prairies, the hills of the East ever green, the Atlantic.

I see my America beginning there on that far coast, Americans awaking to discover ourselves in a new Eden, a garden westwardly endless. In this great place, becoming great-minded, we saw we, we as humankind, had been given history’s largest opportunity. Created equal, we saw all the world equal. We asked the planet’s peoples to join us in throwing off the tyrannies of the ages. In our Congress, on our coins we declared our trust in you and asked your help.

Today, finding ourselves sick to death with self-love, devoid of fellowship with one another as with the peoples who have followed our dream, full of miseries and imposing miseries, we have lost faith in ourselves, in our cause, in you. When we look up to an Horeb or a Sinai, to a Tabor or a Calvary, we see a Sierra Arctic.

But of course we cannot see any transformation, any supreme act of loving, when we are looking for the mountain of gold. We battle our way up the snows for under the snow lies gold. In the snow we die; we cannibalize each other. Our faces in our placer pans, how can we see the love that has come down upon our heights?

Looking now across our vast distances I see every few miles a cross. The little old traditional buildings carry a cross on top or sheerly reverberate with the song and story of the Cross.

Everyone knows it. The most preoccupied of forty-niners whizzing past on the freeway cannot fail to know, however vaguely, the abrupt beams of the symbol that pierce each other in making the claim a divinity has broken into our world, the claim we can break, break into his. -- Nugget-glitter in our wishy-washy dish.

-- Perhaps we have elevated and glorified Mind to hide from ourselves the truth: Mind fooled us and we condemn it. Somewhere in the darkness of our mythic beginnings, Mind failed to see or chose not to see. Whatever the form of our myth -- or however formless our feeling -- we feel in our depths that something is wrong. How can we humans rise to magnificent dreams then fall into sickening depths? It seems to happen every time.

The not-knowing theory gets to be an infinite regression and does not hold up. Also, the theory that we are born perverse fails in the face of every generous act: -- Who can understand human good or human evil?

We are not to blame; of course we are to blame. We are wicked; have a heart -- we are tragic.

Our deepest nature lies beyond the parameters of our reason.

We know. We know as we know we breathe that in our next breath we might turn suicidal or murderous.

From this frigid height one can see miles and miles of crosses more powerful in their message than church crosses: the crosses we have made of ourselves and of our brothers and sisters. Look around. See. We crucify ourselves and each other.

Sign -- sign -- sign -- we are overwhelmed by blood, signs of God’s absence. We excuse ourselves for not seeing signs of his presence; how can we possibly fail to see in ourselves the wrongness that proclaims his absence? Something is wrong.

Look. See. Search all across our landscape for one dale or dell of peace and joy.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

These crucifixions are the signs that spring up when we exclude you from your world.

Oh my Lord, when I stand with you here in the high cold wind of your awesomeness, I feel myself withdrawing from my brothers and sisters, hear myself shouting down upon them the curses of Moses and Aaron: Abandon Yahweh and die in the desert of your own making! Die the death you deserve!

But my heart goes out. I return. I remain with them.

Signs of God’s absence! We demand: Why absent?

Why does he allow us to crucify ourselves, to crucify one another? Is he not almighty? -- He has abdicated.

We raise the fist against him; we have good cause.

If those crucifieds were guilty, we might forgive the excesses of torment. We demand account for six million innocents exterminated by the guilt-monstrous Nazis. We demand account for more than six million native Peruvian victims recorded by the Conquistadors’ priests. We demand an explanation for the innumerable Africans reduced to less-than-human condition. How can we forgive his allowing guilt-rich international corporations to bring addiction to an entire generation of young Asians?

When he looks down on this land of crosses, what does he do?

-- I hear my own voice from down there; I hear myself screaming among them, screaming against the sky.

-- My hands and feet also are bleeding.

How can it be that I am these yet here atop your Tabor, your Calvary? I am there in my long past. I too called all crosses ridiculous, ours and yours. What I wanted and they want from you is that you wipe out, undo, our crucifixion, not join us in it. How incredible the story saying you have joined us! No respectable God would do anything so preposterous. What good does it do anybody?

You come to save us? Save us from what? You fail to save us from the tragedy of our crucifixion; you succumb to it. We are if anything worse off.

-- Omnipotent One, I am horrified to find in my present self traces of that former cry of rebellion. I beg you, beg you clarify my mind. -- Now, Lord; now, please.

I see -- how could I ever doubt seeing? I see the sinfulness, see our sin, see my sin.

-- Fellows! Brothers and sisters! Look around. Ask: These heaped dead Native Americans, how did they die? By acts of God -- avalanches? Or by human actions? By our actions. -- Then open your eyes and see the sin! -- His because he allowed us, or ours because we did the killing? We.

Look at the living rot-pile of African American miseries -- incarceration by God, or by us? We must, must face the sin! Look through time and round the world at all the colonial peoples, of today’s economic colonization and its ruthlessness -- are these acts of God? Stand up and take the blame we can no way escape!

Worst, see the planet-wide pogrom of the poor -- smelting human beings yields us more gold than all our mines. We deafen ourselves to their gasping dying; we make sure never to hear their moanings and groanings while they are alive. -- Brothers! Sisters! Look at us -- look at us, bloody-handed. How can we fail, if only we look to see our sin? Sin; sin.

Our Earth, yes, is crawling with wrongs. We are the wrongs.

My God, this is -- I know you brought me through the conversion experience some years ago -- this is another conversion experience.

I see myself; I leap toward you. I leap away from myself to you.

Coming down from the mountain, I look for my confessor.

Our sin is itself our sign.

Here I pause to pray.

I pray you will not allow me to fall again into the pit, even in sympathy. Merely to imagine myself standing against you, Love, sickens me.

What I hear now I cannot cry out with them -- what they are screaming for now would put an end to the God-man adventure, would wipe out the humanity of humans.

They are demanding: Why did you let Hitler slaughter the six million? Why didn’t you stop him? Why do you allow the corporations to ruin the millions on millions of Asian lives? Why did you tolerate the Conquistadors? The empire-builders? Why do you leave the rich free to grind the poor? -- Whose sin is all this? It’s your fault, God, not ours.

These words violate my ears; I cannot endure them.

Because I know you. As loved one, I know your love. In their frenzy these rationalities have gone irrational. Of course sin is our thing, a human thing; we see it all the time. That part of their error, of which they have superabundant experience -- the shedding of human responsibility -- I cannot tolerate. They have however no experience of you, the God to whom they wish to impute the world’s evil. This is where I differ and may forever differ with them -- I know you.

You have nourished me in the nest; you have warmed me with your warm being. You have. You have brought me out of the cold place where my brothers and sisters shriek their insanities. Even as I rejoice in you I ache for them.

Their idea of God is that of Milton -- the Creator; the Christ victorious through superior virtue. Their God-picture is the Masonic picture, the Architect and Engineer with calipers. They have not touched you. You have not touched them -- no doubt you have tried.

I shudder at their imprecations because you have held me in arms; I know your love as I knew my mother’s or my lover’s. I know you love everyone like this.

What then do I say to my frantic fellows?

My friends, face it: Sin is us. What does he come to save us from? From ourselves.

Listen if you can: The freedom he gives you to hate and destroy is the freedom he gives you to love and create. If he took away Hitler’s freedom to slaughter he would be taking away his freedom to love.

-- So -- you say -- there are many others to love God and love brothers and sisters; annihilate this monster; he will be no loss.

No; no; that is not the way God thinks. He loves each and every one of us; no one is expendable; he will not deprive the monster of the ability to love no matter what the cost.

-- Six million Jews, the cost?

Their tradition enlightens them: They know their deaths are not without meaning.

To God, remember -- and to many Jews themselves -- death is a passage from temporary unhappiness to eternal bliss.

-- No way will we let you make light of this Nazi pogrom. No way will we let you minimize its horror.

I am not reducing the tragedy; that God’s love is willing to accept so high a price to give humans a chance to love does not reduce the price; it shows you, or should, how high love stands in his mind -- his own love for all, including the wicked; the incredible possibilities for us of loving him and all people and all beings...! We have not begun to appreciate, we Earthlings, the beauty, the value, the preciousness of the Ring of the Kingdom.

Where you are, my friends, I have been. I know not-knowing God. Thanks to him, I also know knowing God.

His love is greater than the whole unthinkable heap of human foulness.

I love you; I love you!

Here I am, setting myself up as prophet denouncing fellow Americans for not submitting to the conviction of sin while blithely I forget I myself had not submitted.

Because you thrust yourself on me in Nature’s beauty, thrust not only your beneficence but your love, I had grown rapidly in understanding of you and in responding love. But I gave little or no time to contemplating the moral order. I had not pulled together my knowledge of the history of man’s inhumanity to man. -- Nor the struggles with guilt which have beset us through the ages, nor the planet-wide conviction that some acts are crimes, that crimes deserve punishment, nor our inevitable experience of blessing one another through unselfish giving, and hurting through selfishness -- hurting ourselves more than our victims. We rarely admit but know with certainty that our wrongs heaped on others become a pit of wrongness within ourselves, a pit of nauseous self-loathing.

Having only disconnected and rather shallow understandings of wrong and guilt and having no habit of living in close touch with my conscience, I wanted to enjoy the daily blisses of our happy relationship; I wanted to live with you in an undisturbed rose garden.

The Christ story I remembered from youth had nothing to do with the God of love who had become so intimate with me. My secular humanist idea of the Cross had not changed: The Cross was foolishness. Worse, the Cross was a residuum of human sacrifice and barbaric times; it had no place in civilized society.

The Christ story and the Cross did not enter into my God-relationship. I would not tolerate them; they were unworthy.

I preferred to stimulate through Nature the love-rhapsodies which had made my life so sweet. It is Springtime. The Peconic River, along whose grassy banks I lived and where my canoe was drawn up, mirrored the fattening leaves that arched overhead more and more densely. From the water, rushes and sedges arose; the surface bloomed water lilies and rafts of tiny “water clover”; chevrons of ripples fell back from ducks, geese, swans and their chicks; fish jumped, swallows cut figures. The yellow canoe brightly inverted me but the time had come for afternoon meditation.

Having found the prone position conducive to contemplation, I lay myself on my bed to review, beholdingly, some of these recent wonderful sensory experiences. I floated in peace and joy.

A shadow came over me where I lay. I knew almost at once what this figure was that brought the darkness: the Christ on his Cross. At sight of him I felt more of the antipathy that ordinarily sprang up in me thinking of the crucifixion. Totally compelled, fascinated, yet horrified I saw in this bloodied and spittled dying man the God of flowers and blue skies who had filled my mind. My eyes saw; I saw my loved and loving beautiful God in the shamed and battered man; I saw, searing my vision with its intensity, the identity of my creative Love and Joy with this very nearly discreated like-me man, this oh-too-archetypical crucified human being.

“No!” I pleaded. I cried out, “No!” I shouted, “No!”

I began to writhe and kick. For as long as an hour the awareness of this divine, this human, tragedy did not release me; I writhed and kicked, repeated “No!” and repeated “No!”

In exhaustion I sat up to face my room and my day -- how strange they were! How unreal!

I limped through two or three days, slowly fashioning a hope of talking with my nun-counselor but too weak to make the move.

I told her the experience, told her it had the finality and decisiveness of -- of what? -- of a birth I had been gestating.

She delighted in serving as midwife.

The experience, I told her, left in me no slightest possibility of doubt of the truth of its message. Probably I should see a priest for formal re-acceptance into the Church. She knew one who had lived for a while in a contemplative monastery; she advised me, however, to spend a few days alone with my Christ-God, accustom myself to him, to the love he so forcefully expressed through body and blood.

We talked about the mystery of Love as the counter to the mystery of Evil, about Love’s transformation of Evil.

On Ash Wednesday I was accepted; I received his Sacrament on Holy Thursday.

My Lord God, I give you thanks for the miracle of conversion. More obviously than with other converts, you brought me, by careful and long-suffering ploys and moves, back to yourself. In no sense did I “return” to the “faith.” I never intended it. If someone had asked me to return, I would have refused.

Among the most recent of your “ploys”: My brother told me only a week before the experience that I had no conception of the depth of evil in sin. One aspect of this much-meaningful experience had been the directness with which it showed me, physically -- massively physically, the terrible extent of the misery of the Christ.

Never in my early years of piety had I known more than a suggestion of the catastrophe that had overtaken the God-man.

One recalls only later, when normal sight is restored, the widespread details of landscape illuminated for a nanosecond by violent lightening. So I remembered later that in his death I saw not only the man-Christ die but the Word who had been made flesh. Coming to the Christ as the creator divinity I had loved, unlike most Christians, who came to him as a fellow human, I watched Christ’s God-nature go down in a defeat of the divine will.

All his angels would have agreed with me, I felt confident: God in his goodly love had been brought down by these creatures in their horrific sinfulness. Not his will won out, but theirs. If he is not omnipotent, his Godness has gone. The divinity -- of the Word, if not of Father and Spirit -- has been annihilated.

No wonder “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” No wonder Gethsemani.

Vaguely as I saw this then, I saw also the complexity -- to my baffled eyes -- of what had happened. For what had happened he had done. His participation added a new and radical dimension. I remembered Paul: “He did not consider divinity something to be grasped at.”

Too stunned to pursue complexities, I experienced his last groan as one single blow struck at me though a double one: the immeasurable evil of the sin that had done this to him and the immeasurable good of the victim who freely accepted. It was then, only then, that I experienced conviction of sin. It was then, only then, that I experienced “conviction of love” -- for this God moved, thought, lived, on levels far higher than beautiful flowers and magnificent mountains.

I hurt, I hurt. It was literally excruciating. I hurt, I hurt; I cried out my helpless NO knowing it was helpless.

I loved God in those moments as I had never loved before. My love -- and his -- redoubled the hurt.

-- Even now, remembering, oh God....

The joy of that Springtime became fulfilled in the joy of the love of God through Christ. Christ was then for me and remains God breaking into our human world -- Emmanuel, God with us. Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis -- God came among us like one of us. The world he came into was, is, a world of misery, and he took on himself the fullness of its misery. In fact I learned to see the full misery of the world by seeing the misery of Christ. But he triumphed over misery. -- Over his own in that when he was reduced to nothing the Holy Spirit enabled him to make a love-act out of defeat itself -- in history’s most tragic catastrophe, history’s most sublime moment: the incomparable beauty of God giving himself up for his creature. -- Over our misery in that in giving himself to us he enables us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to accept him and share in his goodness and joy. -- The Maypole establishes the Ring forever.

From the beginning, then, my Christian experience has been colored by the darkness of the conviction of sin and of your pain in taking this guilt and hurt upon yourself, but the experience has actually been dominated and polychromed with all brilliances by the lightsomeness your love irradiates through the experience.

During the first weeks and months, my awareness of darkness focused on my inability to allow you -- you too good, too loving -- to accept, without my protest, the horrors rightly ours, mine.

In putting together a new life I felt I needed to make an effort toward reconciliation with my alienated family. Because they had all settled in California I proposed to go there, pulling up my roots in Long Island and Southwest Florida. Also I felt a need to find a monastery to guide me in this new life.

On the way West I stopped to visit the brother who had remained my steadfast Christian friend and stopped to spend some days at the Christian Brothers mother house where my Christian experience had first begun.

In a wild coincidence, at the Brothers I ran into the nun who had been my counselor in Florida. She told me I needed to attack at once the problem I had in disapproving Christ’s miseries properly ours. (I had postponed consideration of this until I should be “better prepared.”)

Crowning the Brothers’ graveyard is a grotto of Calvary with, on top, near-full-size figures. I prayed before this grotto. At length I retired to the shade, sat on a corner where two dry walls met, looked down across the rustic beauty of the Merrimac River Valley. I soon saw a different vision.

I saw him at very nearly his worst moment on the Cross. He still had in himself the intensity of life, of the Word. His eyes looked into mine, drilled into mine.

Your eyes, Christ my God!

All the pain of your body, your heart’s ignominy and failure -- all this I saw in your extended limbs, in the crowd around, but in your eyes I saw none of this. I saw only your love for me, Christ, your love for me only! It was as though for you nothing existed, no sin, no heaven lost, nothing; nothing mattered except you in your love for me and I in my love for you. For a long time we looked into each other, swam in each other’s eyes. This eye-contact became real as a substance, real as an iron bar. We were joined -- joined, oned.

No shadow of my former disapproval of your taking such pain for me, for us, occurred to me.

Instead, I became filled with the desire to share your pain. I told you you should let me share. I told you it would not be fair for you to take all this alone; in justice you owed it to me to give me some.

Sensing your reluctance, I commanded you, by the sacredness of your love, to give me some pain in my lifetime.

I knew by the love in your eyes that you heard my prayer. I felt a moment of triumph in the certainty that my pain, whatever it was to me, would be a mode of my love for you just as here and now your last moment of agony was for you a mode of your love for me.

-- I returned to the mother house full of prayerful peace.

There is a sense in which it can be said I love each moment now and have lived each moment in the presence and pressure of those eyes.

I have never lost sight or sense of that pain nor of that glory.

The horizon began to buckle and bulge as I crossed the lowlands of Oklahoma and Texas. At first hardly discernible, the lifting and rising irregularities became a mountain range. Earth became dustier as I moved toward the range, green-sparse and stony. My pilgrimage brought me into hugely broken terrain -- great spaces from which uprose monumental land-forms, some of which were cracked open into perilous gulches and canyons. Many land-forms were mesas -- remnants of plateau rock that had been eroded through millennia. Some were inexplicably angled uptilts. Some were wayward lonely peaks. All were different. Here in this land Earth had thrown up heroic rock formations, each unique: the Southwest.

Coming through abrupt and tangled hills at a pass, I saw sunlight silver the rain-streaks leaning across the flank of a mountain I had thought was a hill. Dark scud encircling me, a horizon of its own making, I found in the opposite direction another squall arrowing brightly upon another mountain that had seemed a hill.

Unrained-upon, like most cars in the area, the camper rolled down into Albuquerque.

-- So like the human condition, the Southwest in its stupendous beauties and its frightful uglinesses of precipice and chasms of desiccated Earth. -- An area always and from every direction threatening death yet superbly and uniquely offering a challenge to life.

Only vaguely then, more clearly later, I recognized in the place an analog of the present country of my soul. -- By “present” I refer to the entire period from conversion experience -- double or twin experiences -- and now. On the one side, I am a “familiar” of Christ on the Cross; I fairly make a home in the mystery of evil. On this other, the Christ of Resurrection makes his stupendous beauty my residence however unworthy I am; I make my true home in the mystery of love.

After visiting Father Richard Rohr’s center in Albuquerque, I pilgrimaged to several monasteries in the Southwest and in California. Driving from Long Island in the Atlantic to a Pacific beach in Golden Gate Park opened my imagination and my heart to our magnificent continent and expanded my awareness of both the greatness and the desperateness of my country -- and both the sublimities and anguishes within me.

The anguishes peaked in visits to my children and the non-visit with my withdrawn wife.

The sublimities displayed ever-new aspects in each of the welcoming religious houses.

How will I ever thank you, Lord of my life, for bringing me to the Hermitage? You had me stay there as a worker and near-fully participating monk for six months, until ill health caused me to leave. Then you sustained my participation through oblature, frequent retreats, regular telephone conversations with my spiritual guide. Since conversion, sharing this life of the you-centered community has been your most fruitful gift to me.

More and more, in the monastery, you led me from Calvary to the Resurrection garden. Like Magdalene embracing you I felt the pulse of your sweetness. As the Risen One you gave me the Holy Spirit and through her, through Love-Wisdom, you taught me inner ways of your most Holy Trinity.

And so began, for this sinner who had fought you off for years, the life of singing and dancing in the Maypole Ring.

Counter-weighting my joy, I could never remain long without consciousness that you, God-Christ, have come among us for love to suffer with us, that we, “the darkness,” have not understood you nor the destructing self-centered sinfulness that is both worldwide and in front of our faces. I cannot remain long without awareness of the pogroms that we, especially Aryans now led by Aryan America, have wreaked on brothers and sisters of color. The cries of the exploited screech out from this planet; the cries of the exploiters, though most are deaf, screech to beyond the Moon. So much weeping! So much pain and despair! Oh God, how can I not live in a state of misery?

Christ my Lord, in conversion I had difficulty accepting your suffering. Since, I have had difficulty in accepting human suffering and its common cause, sin.

Forgive me now as you did then. Holy Spirit, my Love, teach me now as you did then.

Oh, God, how can I die a whole person? -- Die without reservation yours?

Why can I not let it go? -- This being torn apart. Why do I demand resolution?

Foolishly and pompously, I scour the horizons of the world and the remotenesses of human destiny while my own split personality shrieks like the wheel that is not rolling but scraping.

In these moments as I am writing as a person who has been given to share in the divine, I am equally truly enslaved to self-involvement, to self-assertion, to readiness to inflict pain on anyone who crosses me.

Likewise this dancer among the clouds participates, one way and another, consumer or voter, in the American national crimes.

Pathetically too, the dancer, crucified, shares in the crucifixions of his agonizing brothers and sisters.

-- Torn?

During these few weeks and days, Lord, I see you in your love beginning the purgation that will set me free at last for the Ring.

You are beginning my liberation from myself, from my own opinions, from the demandingness I impose on friends, on family, on life, on you.

I begin to see in tragedy’s fire the light of love.

Yes, now I look ahead to dancing in the Ring, singing songs of love and gratitude. You, flowering Christ, center us; you oh Three in One, receive our joy and our love. From the first moment to the eternal moment, I will see, your love tells me, tells everyone, however obtuse we have been, your love is everything. Everything is your love.

“Cuan delicadamente tu me enamoras!”

“How subtly you have made me fall in love with you!”

From some weed -- thistle, dandelion -- a down floating upward, light as nothing, I rise lifted on your breath.

Below on our right fall away Half Dome, Bridal Veil and El Capitan, the valley lying hidden in its own depths. Surrounding mountains lift the sky; ahead, bald peaks thrust above tree-line in pyramids of primal stone-work. They dike from the continent eastward the Pacific’s fetch of weathers, their wall rising to dizzy altitudes and rare air. In granitic glintings and shadowings, the rock heights claim themselves to themselves, allowing nothing but rock-layer upon rock-layer to have presence -- no leaf, no flower, no blade of grass, nor animal nor bird. Green life, like surf, hurls itself onto them each season and each season fails.

You keep us low, however, low in the saucered valleys at the feet. Pure light, fresh-entering Earth’s atmosphere, soaks the varied greens greener, the greens of encircling fir and spruce, of, in the final assault, twisted junipers. Springsong lively the light splashes from streams and cascades. Sun invades the meadow grasses to their roots, billows across the prairie-like spaces, fountains into polychrome flowers. Colonies of color are patchworked onto gentle swells and ripple under the endless breezes. You swing us down where a meadow ledges to a brook and its water-loving trees -- cottonwood, willow, sycamore. We walk.

We walk not in the cool of the evening but in the warmth of a midday sun that overcomes the cool of ten thousand feet; we hear no guarding angels humming from all round, but evergreens -- leaves breezing from beside brooks, and the brooks themselves purling and gurgling.

As my eyes focus more clearly on what is around us I discern, in the center of this meadow, people dancing, circling round and round, in harmony with trees and waters. I am able to distinguish the familiar songs and joy.

I bolt away, run toward the people.

-- What am I doing? Leaving God behind, a sinner returning to sinners?

Or -- or what?

Epilogue

The writer is now too weak physically to continue writing. He feels as though he is being allowed to “peek over the edge” to life after death. He asks his assistant to put his vision into words. He now refers to himself as “Barnabus.”

Barnabus stops short in his mad dash toward the Ring. Before him stands a bony old man. “Though he slay me, I will trust in him.” Barnabus realizes the old man is Job.

Then Job answered the Lord and said:

“I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered. I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know. I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you. Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:1-6).

The old man is looking not at Barnabus but past him, at God, from whom Barnabus is fleeing. Barnabus takes Job’s words as his own and runs back to God. He sings with Job:

“Though he slay me, I will trust in him.”

Now, together, they can see the dancers even while turned toward God. Barnabus is no longer torn between solidarity with suffering mankind and allegiance to God. Standing before God he looks back at the people and sings,

“Though you slay them, I will trust in you.”

God now takes Barnabus back to Mt. Whitney, where he reveals his plan of salvation for the entire universe. He can see the same miseries as before, but he is also able to see a small part of the good God is doing all the time before our eyes. If only we could see instead of being blinded by misery!

Man’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden harmed and continues to harm the natural world, but all is not lost as God continues to reveal his goodness in the ecology and beauty of the natural world. God provides everything to sustain physically a multitude of life forms, including human beings.

Barnabus sees that the Maypole Ring celebrates more than the salvation of one particular soul -- his own. He contemplates the future of suffering mankind within the plan of salvation, sees it reaching even beyond this to encompass the whole suffering universe.

He sees the Divine Word himself, the center of the Ring, the Cross of joy and the triumph of Resurrection for the whole universe. This is the huge reality that will come to pass. Around Christ crucified on the Cross, all creation dances -- man, animals, the entire universe. The Maypole is the Resurrection flowering from the Crucifixion.

Once Barnabus can say “Though you slay me...” -- even if the universe seems dark and cold and meaningless -- he can see that God in his love also makes the beauty of stars and planets and other galaxies. He sustains the beautiful system that scientists call “fine tuned,” the delicate beauty of the truth.

God has given his own beauty and truth to human beings and to the universe. He chose to do this not in sovereign isolation but by participating in our destiny. Theilhard de Chardin goes so far as to say that God has given the universe a soul -- the soul of the universe is the mind of man. He calls this layer of the universe the “noosphere.”

But we wrecked this beautiful universe ourselves. We are like a man who stuck his thumb in his own eye; we cannot see the beauty that still exists.

Characteristically, God will not restore the universe by himself but will require our participation. In God’s plan of salvation, only by cooperating with Christ can we help him to revivify creation, to re-create the whole world. He asks not a single person, alone, but asks all of us to work together with him. The work of salvation cannot be actualized without the cooperation and participation of human beings.

When God gives freedom to human beings, he takes a terrible gamble. What if every single human being turns him down? How much he must love us to make us co-creators of the whole world. This is the supreme act of lovers giving each other their very life.

The writer’s eyes close, and his face crumples in speechless tears of wonder and gratitude, a familiar expression in his last years.

The End