---

Last week we ended by looking at transcending normative experience; that is, going beyond the experience of God that occurs in our daily living and pressing for the sort of closeness that Abraham had in his most challenging times. Living a life with God means living it to the full, not just accepting a relationship with Him by carrying on as though little has changed – ‘everything’ has changed. If you are trying to find God in relation to your normative experiences, or your ethics, or your characteristics, you will carry on ad infinitum with false hopes, never reaching the highest levels. Only when you realise that those resounding and ineffable hopes and realms which make up the real inner-self are in fact the real distillation of Him to you, of Christ into man, will you be in receiving distance of the Divine plan. Just as with Abraham’s situation - the real sense of the Divine plan will immediately eliminate all thoughts of making a god of your own cognition but at the same time bless the one who strives to be like Christ by serving as Christ served. 

 

The man who wishes to make no commitment to God is free to do so, but he is going to live in a world where the following is true. If he tries to remain impervious to the temptation to find inner-harmony he will forever be tormented by psychological trickery. If he tries to make a subliminal appeal to the vague rudiments of supernature yet retain no interest in the Divine plan he will be a friend to the world but blocked from the universal. But if he tries to make an appeal to God through the blood Christ shed; if he surrenders himself and accepts that only the blood of Christ can make him into what God wants him to be, he will be the best man that he can possibly be. He will know for sure that the world has nothing to offer him that he cannot find in a greater form through Christ. Only in the world does physical beauty think it can glorify love; only in the world does beauty think itself the god of love; only in the world does sorrow attach itself to equally sorrowful things. When a man fails to make God his first priority, and when he tries to fit God into all the other facets of his life instead of fitting other facets into his relationship with God, he has stepped off the high levels. 

 

We are excluded from none of the highs; only those from which we exclude ourselves through complacency. We may have to wait until we are ready to receive the most glorious things - but we shall be left in no doubt that the Divine plan is the one and only reality, that glory will only come in Divine colours. Those on the outside of the Divine plan might feel, like Bertrand Russell, that they were entitled to more evidence; thus they trivialise supernature as one big cheat. But this is a big lie. In the world of the Divine the only people who are cheated are the ones who cheat themselves out of it; the gift of freedom has no more chance of interrupting the cheat than if a man who is desperate to get fit decided to pretend he has spent an hour on his exercise bike when no one was looking. 

 

And this brings me to an important question. How many of us can rely on our own ability to make the most lucid judgements about the self? Answered honestly we soon find that the more we make ourselves a master the easier it is to deceive ourselves into an over-generous self-judgement. This may be a transitory consolation, but the prolonging of this will do us little good in the end; it is only when we allow God to be master that we will be able to judge ourselves properly. In fact, even the first stages of honest judgement require the right amount of latitude given to the cognition so that it might honestly search and not be distracted by the senses or by experience and imagination. Unless our judgement is coming from the most honest parts of what is inside, and unless the real truth of the self is revealed to us from our noblest parts, we shall never know the self. The stark realities which we can so easily dispense with out in the open still lie in every soul, waiting to be transformed by Christ into something worthy of the self that He created. 

 

In one way it is surprising that this glory inside us has not, through false conviction, manifested itself outwardly in more people than it has. But of course, in saying this we must consider the biggest part of the cheat. That the real potential which has been so shockingly ruined by hubris is abated not by strong contact with the most noble parts of the self but by its diminution in the presence of other like minded people. In other words, the pride which subsumes the most proud man remains big only in the sense that he is the biggest. But as soon as one who is more proud enters the room, the sober judgement with which a man should look upon himself (and could if he were more attentive) instead turns him into a more competitive individual, always striving until striving itself become unbearable. I think it would be true to say that if a man could for a brief few moments assimilate into his mind all the real workings of the inner-self; the insecurity, the jealousy, the envy, the hubris, and the claustrophobic need to escape the goodness in others, he would soon see that the clamorous need to assent to the self and be one’s own master is not a duty fit for man but only for God Himself.

 

Perhaps as regards finding Christ one can find a similar love in the shape of the search for a purpose in life.  The great thing about both is that we do not want them both simply for their own sake but for the further enrichments they bring too. A real lucid examination will reveal to the self its true position as regards faith in Christ. To want it whether it is true or not is to be in the position of the fool; to not want it whether it is true or not is equally to be in the position of the fool; but to want it only if it is true is to be in the position of a wise man – this is where the search for truth and self-honesty become intertwined and one’s purpose begins to take shape.

 

And once we start to get vague hints of the truth, we are in the greatest position to push ourselves forward into His presence; for then we shall find ourselves immersed in the Divine plan and, thus, the Divine blessings. If we were to cast everything we have on to God we would soon find that everything inside of us was searching for Him all along. We will find that even the most glorious travails can be surmounted; that nothing which hurts the self can remain in the self unless it is part of the hurt that Christ had to endure to make us glorified in greatness. We shall find a glorious harmony with the Divine; we shall find that the only tears we shed will be the tears that Christ shed in making us part of the Divine plan. 

 

And that, I think, is the real nature of the self and all the self-honesty and purpose and truth we can muster. Either our inner-longings have been hinting at something bigger; something which can be ours if we step out of normative levels for a second, or else everything that is precious inside is merely another tantalising part of purposeless nature. Either we long for one thing and, thus, everything - or we long for nothing and, thus, nothing in this world can ever satisfy us. Whatever we learn about ourselves from experience and from each other will tell us nothing more about the real nature of being human than that which we learn by seeking Christ. Just as no man has learned from another how to love or how to feel sympathy or how to be envious - no man has ever needed another to be taught how to find the deep faith or the inner-conviction necessary to bring him into the Divine plan.   

 

That is why faith is a virtue - it is a virtue because it is a blessing directly from God. There will be many good folk who will come to know Christ through faith and self-surrender; there will be many bad folk who will experience Christ through the amazing transformation of their inner-self because of faith. But there will be none on earth who can advance any further than deep faith – it is the whole process of being in a relationship based on trust and love, and this epitomises the relationship of Abraham to God. And that is why the blessings that Christ wants to give us are more than enough to fill everyone with hope. Anyone who comes to understand the real nature of faith (whether he is a genius or a fool) will see that every moment of his waking life is a moment which precedes both greater wisdom and greater blessings – he is always searching and exploring. 

 

And those who are drawn to stagnancy (or in some cases misery) by their own unwillingness to search and explore are the ones who claim that superficial relationships are equally as fulfilling. They will, I’m afraid, be content to stay in darkness while they know of no light. Such people are not always as frivolous as it may appear. They will not at first signs of heavy waves jump on to a safer ship. The man who is faced with this must first make sure that his feelings are the best life can give. He is brave enough to face the charlatans and decree that ‘love is the answer’ as long as he can stay confident that they think what he has is better than what they have. He thinks that they wish they were in his shoes. He feels a euphoric exhilaration when the very best parts of love flow through his body, yet the deepest parts of his inner-self still cry out for God (although he won’t always recognise it as a desire for God). All along his satisfied love cannot help him escape the solemnity of his deepest self, for in his deepest analysis his position is a poor one - eroding away like rocks against fierce waves. 

 

The love he feels for nature has the potential to turn him into an outward warrior, yet inwardly he is waving away birds of peace - his passions are stirred in the wrong direction. If a man is to become part of the Divine plan, he is going to have to become fervent not by instruction but by locating the distinction between what one has and what one wants. Unless he sees a leap of faith as a prodigious blessing and liberation he will remain stagnant, holding back that which he needs to let go. The blessing comes not just from understanding the need for the leap but also from finding the resources to see why understanding is necessary. 

 

The first moment when a man knows his future is with God or blisslessness is the moment that the reality of every hope and dream is compressed into one wish to know God. And if the initial faith never arrives he will forever be one of those men who does not invest his talents but instead keeps them buried for safety. You will always find him seeking consolation where there is none to be found. But the man who is ready for the leap will be a man who can see the biggest picture from the smallest palette. He can see from his own reflection in the wayside ditch all the Heavens that stand around him. Every time he consciously rejects the glory, he sees in that rejection a profound silencing of the echo that belongs to the most exciting melody. Only the smaller things in life lose touch of what they were; the frog never remembers it was a tadpole, but man cannot really forget what he was created for. The most profound parts of the inner-self never really go away - we know them from an early age, we just don’t know what to do with them until Christ turns them into purposeful and personal truths. Who could say in all honesty that the deepest and most coveted magic of nineteen wasn’t already in the soul at nine? Every moment that strays from the deep feelings of the magical is precisely the longing for what is absent; the man living in isolation has ascribed these feelings of loss with ordinary clouds of daily change, so much so that if this feeling could manifest itself in love even for a brief moment, he would take the closest proximate images and keep them forever. But that is another part of the cheat – nothing in nature is anything but a close resemblance of the magic and the transcendence that we long for. Our coveting is not for nature – it for something beyond her.

 

Only the most spiritually isolated people think that there is nothing beyond the desiring of humans - they speak as if they could jump to the moon in the morning or trace back the whole of human history to a few anthropological statistics. Only when a man is part of the Divine plan will he have the first clue about the true design of man. He will see that limitations stop merely as earthly things stop; that the universal has no such limits. Just like Abraham, the man who seeks the universal will be able to find the magic in the Divine plan. He will recognise the promise not through a novelty but through familiarity; he will know that this seemingly new liberation is no new thing; it is a journey back to the real self. 

 

The real nature of purpose and glory is prostration before the One who can offer purpose and glory, just as an injured soldier can only by saved by one who is fit enough to fight for both of them. Only the man who is not proud can stand before God as Abraham did and sense the Divine plan - the Lord’s plan for each individual. The sacrifice of the self amounts to an understanding of the Divine sacrifice. A man must not be too hasty and step too far too soon - but if he makes the leap of faith and wants to understand everything possible he will be blessed into the Divine plan. The removal of pride is the beginning of real wisdom; it is where the journey begins. Only when a man can know his true position, both in relation to God and in relation to the universe, can he begin to leap into the glorious knowledge of the universal. And only when he sees Christ on the cross in Abraham and Isaac, and reconciles himself to Christ’s suffering and commitment will he be able to see Him in all His glory.