Everyone baptized into Christ should pass progressively
through the stages of Christ-life.
GREGORY OF SINAI
If you would appropriate Him, then you must follow His whole pattern.
JACOB BOEHME
The eye is not able to understand
His glorious transformations.
And tongues of flame live in Him
Who sent tongues of flame at His Ascension.
ST. EPHREM THE SYRIAN
EXPERIENCING THE COSMIC CHRIST
PART II
This is the glory I am and you are.
This is the passion I am and you are.
This is the miracle I am and you are.
This is the supreme beauty I am and you are.
"This is the bliss and wisdom and tireless just action I am
and you are. So listen to what I am about to reveal to you with amazement
and trembling and remember always the rule of the Christing: "If any
one will come after me, let him or her deny themselves, take up their cross
and follow me. For whoever will save his life shall lose it and whoever
will lose his life for my sake will find it." I am calling you to an
endless dying in love into Life, an endless growth, an endless metamorphosis
in the Fire of Love. You can only enter this field of boundless transformation
if you surrender to the law that governs the whole universe of change,
the law of sacrifice that springs from abandoned humility before the Majesty
and Love of God, and from an always more ardent desire to be useful to
Love's work.
"This is the Divine law: only to the humble can the truth
be revealed, only to those lost in Love can the identity be given, only
to those able to die again and again out of love into Love can the mysteries
of transformation-in-Love be unfolded in all their unending splendor.
And this law will have to be understood in ever deeper and ever more demanding
ways at every stage of the Journey.
"Until the final freedom of resurrection and the final ecstasy
of perpetual birthing-in-flame, which is the deepest meaning of
Pentecost, there will always be death, ordeal, necessary agony. For with
each new growth of My life in you there will be a need for an even greater
surrender, an even more stable and abandoned faith. To keep on growing
into My full splendor, you will have to learn how to keep on dying, and
only those who can deny the self out of love and in an ever more radical
humility of spirit can ever learn how to die in this way.
"I know that such words shake your whole being, make you afraid,
in pain, anxious to escape the demands of so fierce a work. Do not be
ashamed of your fear. I was afraid. Do not be ashamed of
your anguish. I was anguished. Do not be afraid of your desire
to flee the terms of true change. In Gethsemane I, too, begged that
the cup be taken from me. Those who pretend they are not afraid break
easily; those who cannot admit the depth of their anguish cannot learn
its dark mysterious truths nor be taken by its force to a deeper faith
and surrender; those who do not confess their terror at the price of true
change can never know the rapture of discovering that with the help of
Divine Grace that is always given they can endure far more than they know,
suffer far more richly and fecundly than they ever imagined.
"Never imagine as you take the journey into Me that there is
any pain or bewilderment that you could suffer that I have not also suffered,
sometimes even more dreadfully and completely than you can comprehend.
So you never have to hide your heart and its terrors and pains from Me,
for I know them all, grieve for them all, cradle them all, am here beside
and around you as you suffer them: I am in you always to call on for wisdom,
clarity, revelation, inspiration, the strength to weep and the strength
to go on. Don't you understand yet? I am the Divine in the human and the
Human in the Divine, their meeting, their intersection, their infinite
point and their sum. Nothing can ever be foreign to Me that is in you,
for I am you, transfigured, as you will be, and I remember everything of
the pain of the Journey I am asking you to take. I am the Journey and the
Traveller; I am present in every stage of the Journey, every suffering,
and every revelation.
"Now let Me describe to you clearly the meaning in My life and
in everyone's of the eight thresholds and mysteries. And may they all be
accomplished in you, so there can be no barrier at all between us, and
our hearts can live as one with the Heart of All Things forever.
"Allow the Christ to be born in you now, in this terrible time,
when you are needed in your complete power and humility and passion for
service, in your Christhood, more than at any other. For only a vast humble
army of Christing beings, beings who have consciously chosen the Path into
the Christ and its laws of sacrifice and dying and embrace of ever greater
ordeals in the name of ever more complete transformations can effect the
changes that are needed in every arena of life if the planet is to be saved.
"Open your hearts, know that the Divine is real and know that
your deepest truth is of the soul that is one with God. Pray and meditate
and serve others humbly and call on God to reveal the God in you again
and again with total sincerity, and the great moment will come that begins
the Journey into Me--the moment when, for you, the skies will part and
the Dove of Blessing will descend and a Voice will say, "This is My beloved
son or daughter; in him or her I am well pleased."
"This is the moment you have been waiting for all your life
and from the beginning of your evolution--the moment when you know as I
did when John baptized Me that I was one with and beloved by the Father-Mother,
that the whole universe was Mine in Him and Her, that My inmost consciousness
was one with the Consciousness-Fire that is manifesting all the worlds
forever.
"This is the first threshold and mystery: the New Birth.
And with this Baptism into Divine awareness begins a wholly new life--a
life in which you try with all your powers of mind and heart and soul and
with constant invocation of Divine Grace to integrate the laws and visions
of the fire of Love you know are now, with all you do, feel, and think.
The time, cost, and suffering of this initial massive integration of the
Divine and the human will vary in every individual, but everyone will come
to the second threshold inevitably.
"Everyone will be tempted, as I was in the desert when I withdrew
there to bring all the new powers I knew in me to coherence and purity.
And as you come to this second threshold and mystery--that of the
Temptation--you will begin to understand one of the great laws of the Journey
into Me: that every advance is met by a corresponding ordeal. This ordeal
can either derange you or, by compelling you to deeper self-awareness and
a more complete calling down of the Divine Wisdom and Grace, breed in you
a more mature knowledge of your strength and a more fundamental knowledge
of the necessity of humility.
"The second threshold and mystery of the Temptation is where
many, many of those who want to become Me, are ruined. Drunk on the glory
of what the Baptism has revealed to them and, it must be said, on the experience
of new powers of every kind--mental and emotional --within themselves
that are kindled by this glory, everyone is tempted, whether consciously
or half-unconsciously, to use the benefits and truths of the Divine Consciousness
not for God and not for the service of others but for themselves.
"The ego and false self is still present in everyone at this
stage, although in some ways weakened and irradiated by My light. But the
false self is wily and manipulative and can appropriate even the most glorious
experiences of Divine beauty and Divine being for itself. If it does, it
becomes not Divine but demonic; it says "yes" in fact to what the dark
one tried to get me to say "yes" to - to miracle-mongering and using God-given
powers not to serve God but to dominate the world.
"The Christ cannot be born fully in anyone who still wants anything
for himself or herself and who does not want to give everything
away to and for others. Any movement of any kind to appropriate
the powers of the Divine awakening for the false self will end in disaster.
The final power of Love will only be given to the one who has emptied himself
or herself completely of any personal desire for power; it will only be
given in its beauty and transforming radiance to the one who wants only
to serve and help and inspire others and bring about the birth of the Kingdom
in reality. To such a person, all forms of worldly and religious status
will be pathetic, dangerous, and absurd.
"To overcome and pass beyond the threshold and mystery of Temptation
you will have to allow yourself to be purified drastically. You will have
to submit your senses and being to a drastic analysis and reordering; you
will have to confront and dissolve everything in you that wants to be "adored",
or still wants power of any kind. This is distressing, terrible,
dark work, and requires tremendous constancy and clarity, and a great,
continually renewed commitment to be one with Me.
"If the purification is complete--the purification that is appropriate
to this stage--your whole being will be opened as Mine was to the wonder
and power of pouring yourself out in reality to help others. The more you
pour yourself out, the more the Light of God will be revealed to you and
in you; the purer and more passionate your hunger to become one with Me
becomes and is expressed in action, the more of you will be transformed
into Me until the third great threshold and mystery--that of the
Transfiguration--is reached.
"In the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor the Divine Glory in My
Humanity was revealed to Peter, James, and John. In your transfiguration,
My Presence in you will flame out and the whole universe will reveal itself
as being on fire with Me-in-you. Your whole body and mind and heart and
soul will appear in time and space and matter as one flame of My fire and
you will see and know your true face, and it will be seen and known by
all things and in all things.
But, as before in the Journey to Me, a great revelation and
wonder will be succeeded by a tremendous ordeal. And the ordeal that follows
on the Transfiguration is the supreme ordeal, the one which many souls
cannot endure.
"Just as the new powers and faculties born in you after Baptism
had to be integrated with the real and with your daily actions and be made
adamant by the confrontation of the dark one in the Temptation, so now
the glory revealed in you in the Transfiguration has to be wedded at every
level and in every dimension with the whole of reality by continual acts
of deepening sacrifice, which culminates in a great death to all human
notions of self and identity.
The stages beyond Transfiguration--beyond the revelation of
the Divine in the human in glory--can only be reached by an ever-deeper
embrace of the suffering of others, in an ever-deeper passion to flood
every recess of human life, every corner of human affairs with the truth
of Love. And this involves sacrifice after sacrifice, death after death,
until Love has strengthened and matured you to be able to die completely
into eternal life.
TO
BE CONTINUED