Then a shoot shall grow from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall spring from his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and power, a spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. (Isaiah 11:1-2)
THE HUMAN BEING functions on three levels: the physical, the psychical, and the spiritual. None is more important than the other, since each is a composite part of the whole, which is the full person. Spirituality is concerned with the bodily organism, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit and a thing of great intrinsic sanctity. It is also concerned with the psychic connexion that unites the parts of a body into a person, the person into a community, and the community into the full body of Christ that is seen completed in the Communion of Saints. But the apogee of spirituality is communion with God. From this emanates the energising power that sanctifies the psychic realm and the physical world. The Word made Flesh demonstrates this three-fold holiness. The spiritual aspect of man must therefore be granted priority but not greater regard than the other parts of his personality.
The full manifestation of the Spirit in man must infuse heightened vitality, every thought with illuminated understanding, and every emotional response with the deepest caring for others. A new creation can alone contain the full downpouring of the Spirit of God. This Spirit heralds and proclaims a physical transfiguration of the body. The mental inspiration of the Spirit endows the psyche with vast intuitive glimpses of a reality of a very different order from the wildest speculations of the human mind. Its emotional cleansing effect leads to a birth of true spiritual awareness of which the gifts of the Spirit mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12 are a part, albeit only a presage of the glory to be revealed in man.
It cannot be repeated too often that the Holy Spirit effects a renewal of the whole person. The charismatic function mentioned above is only one feature of a much greater inner transformation; it leads to increased psychic sensitivity and power. Those who are ignorant of psychic matters avoid the use of that word, which they erroneously equate with evil, demonic influences. However, an awakening of the psychic senses without a corresponding heightening of the intellectual faculty and a deepening of the awareness of God can easily become demonic inasmuch as the psychic powers are concentrated on the person possessing them rather than bequeathed to God's service in love for one's fellow creatures. This is a hazard of confronting those enthusiasts who equate charismatic gifts with the full working of the Holy Spirit instead of putting these gifts in perspective as one particular grace from God for those who are dedicated in their service to Him.
If the Spirit is working fully, there is an intellectual enlightenment which shows itself in an ability to explore new avenues of thought. Furthermore, the natural state of isolation is relieved and the enclosure of limited self-awareness opened by the inflow of love that comes from God, for "we love because He loved us first". This love casts out fear. Whoever claims the inspiration of the Holy Spirit should have passed beyond the slavery of fear of any principality or power, either temporal or psychic. In the life of the Spirit there is eternal truth, which cannot be dulled by any power, whether physical, intellectual, or even demonic.
There are some religious groups who wage a constant war on what they regard as the demonic powers that influence the world. These people are usually unaware that most of the demonic forces originate from within themselves and are then projected on to any person or group to whom they feel antagonistic. In the end all those who disagree with them are identified with the devil and his works. Many such deluded people are in fact abnormally sensitive psychically, but have not come to terms with their own condition or analysed their impressions dispassionately. If they had the courage and the intelligence to do this, they would realise that most of the demonic forces they encountered were part of the spirit of fear and ignorance that pervades the world and is dominating their own consciousness.
By contrast, the person genuinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, while never oblivious of the demonic dimension of reality, is not overwhelmed by it. He knows how to deal with the dark forces in the world and in himself, quietly, unemotionally, and effectively. Indeed, in collaboration with this work of the Holy Spirit man attains the peak of his nobility. We must strive not merely to check and neutralise the dark forces but to use their impetus for good. This is why a Spirit-filled person's level of awareness is raised far above the lower reaches of the unconscious, where the demonic elements are to be encountered, to the higher planes where he is in full relationship with his fellow men and also with the Communion of Saints. In other words, the Spirit effects a progressive raising of the consciousness of the person whom He infuses. It is centred no longer on the personal self or the impulses striving the self, but is concentrated on God and the service due to Him. It must be noted, however, that in the new awareness of reality, neither the personal self nor its "lower" impulses of preservation, procreation, and assertion are ignored or dismissed. On the contrary, they are acknowledged with thanksgiving, but they cease to be the centre of influence of the person. Instead they are preserved under the guardianship of a newly-raised self that is closer to God.
The self is, as I have already indicated, the focus of personal consciousness. It has to die daily in order to be renewed and raised from the death of selfishness to the life of God. The self is not annihilated in the spiritual life; it is so transformed that the final product can hardly be related to the primitive source of its origin. The end of this is St Paul's exultant cry: "The life I now live is not my life, but the life which Christ lives in me." (Galatians 2:20) The Spirit has done His work when the seed of God, the Word deeply placed in the soul of man, germinates and grows to become the tree of life, which is the true vine described in the fifteenth chapter of St John's Gospel. Then Christ is shown to be all because He is assuredly in all.
The raising of consciousness is a theme widely current in contemporary thought. There are many techniques of meditation canvassed by enthusiasts that aim at achieving a raised consciousness, and it is possible that some even succeed for a time. But the meditator soon lapses into the old way of semi-awareness, because his personality has not been made holy. It remains unredeemed, although in some instances the psychic faculty is released and the meditator may become aware of principalities hidden from other people. But this in itself is as likely to be deleterious as beneficial to his spiritual development. Psychic irruptions into full consciousness are seldom beneficial until such time as the point of full consciousness has become centred on a greater reality than the unredeemed personal self. When one's life is centred on the theme of service and the Person of the Incarnate Lord, then psychic revelations can be properly assimilated and their import used constructively in the life of the person. This point applies equally to the gifts of Spirit - they cease to be "natural" and become truly charismatic only when the person lives the "risen life" of aspiration in Christ. And this, as I have already stated, demands intellectual and spiritual renewal as well as psychic release.
The raising of consciousness is effected in slow degrees by the Spirit, but sometimes there is a much greater, dramatically sudden opening of awareness so that the totality of existence may be momentarily revealed. This is the basis of mystical experience, in which God is known directly. The knowledge of God is not by intellectual understanding but by direct union with Him. It is not dissimilar to the true knowledge we may gain of someone close to us in a relationship. At first we see him from afar in terms of his outer appearance and his work in the world. We may admire his character and extol his excellent attributes. But when we come closer to him all these facets fall away, and the person becomes more naked to our inner scrutiny. We cease to regard him as a particular individual with gifts, powers, and attributes, but instead begin to feel him as a person. His stature in the world's eyes, or even in our own rational appraisal, becomes increasingly irrelevant. It is what he is as a representative of God's creation in the form of a person that matters. Steadily we come to know his coming and his going, his response and his withdrawal, his affection and his aversion, until we are able to respond intuitively to his presence. When there is complete union of regard - and how beautiful is the archaic way of expressing perfect sexual union as one person's knowledge of another - each loses the self in the other. Arising like a phoenix from this sacrifice, a new creation emerges, a creation that owes its conception to the birth of the Seed Who is Christ in the soul of each lover. The form that this creation assumes may be a human personality conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit or it may be an intuitive glimpse into the full reality of life, which is made real by a renewed dedication and a heightened sense of endeavour.
If this manifestation of the divinity that lies hidden in the soul of each one of us can follow perfect union of one person with another, how much more wonderful is the knowledge that God vouchsafes us when we are sufficiently lifted in awareness to be with Him in the fellowship of unitive love. He lifts the veil that the world of multiplicity has knit around us, preventing us seeing the full reality for the complexity of its parts. Beyond that cloud of confusion there shines the light of eternal order; on the far side of the cloud of unknowing there awaits a vision of beatific reality; transcending the multitude of forms and aspects there is a unity of regard that binds together all pieces, all individuals, all contradictions into a coherent whole, the cementing power of which is love. In the awakened state of consciousness the Spirit is no longer apart from us and only distantly available; He is known to be the atmosphere around us at this very moment and beyond all time. In truth it is "in Him that we live and move, in Him we exist". Then at last do we know with irrefutable certainly God's will for us. It is that we should be like Him, and to this end He has given us the love that creates and sustains the universe. This love, whose range is beyond understanding, is made available in its totality for each individual creature, so that every one may be raised from glory to glory to attain the pre-ordained, final state of a realised son of God.
It is when we know God in unitive regard that we understand, not only with the reason but also with the heart, that love is the supreme property of life, and that its end is man's growth into the corporate unity of God. And yet this growth, though the very purpose of life, requires man's full assent. It is not an automatic process in which the creature is carried along passively. For the creaturely assent there must first be a renewed, redeemed will, a will freed from the slavery of lower personal desires and now set on nothing less than bringing the kingdom of God, which is love, down to the earth. The redemption of the personal will, which is in effect the preliminary work that the Holy Spirit performs in preparation for the divine encounter in man, follows, as we have seen, great personal suffering and the abasement of personal pride in the refining fire of humiliation. Only then can the Word, deeply set in the soul as the Seed of Christ, teach the will discipline as It teaches the personality the meaning of unreserved love. A redeemed will is a glorious testimony to the divine creation. It is free in intent, vibrant in energy, and warm in affection. It is now able to work in harmony with the sanctifying Spirit of God - and as it co-operates with the Spirit and dedicates itself to the world's service, so it attains greater sanctification and glimpses that perfection to which Christ points the way in His command and, above all, in His ministry.
The full impact of the Holy Spirit is known only in direct mystical illumination. Everything that preceded the event of illumination is a preparation for the unitive encounter. Assuredly the Spirit was active in the life of the disciple long before the peak of recognition, but He was effecting preliminary work on the personality. This is where the early stages of exploration into the darkness of the unconscious were of vital importance, so that the cleansing and redemption of all that was awry could be achieved by the forgiving love of God. Likewise the will had to be gradually weaned from the dominance of the self to the dedication of the self to God - seen above all in service to one's fellows. And the psychic faculty needed to be cleared of personal illusion, so that it could become a transparent, pellucid medium of communication between the Holy Spirit and the person, embracing the full Communion of Saints in its extent.
When "this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" - and acknowledging it I love it - when it is "thy will not mine be done", when the media of psychical communication are cleared of all interference and illusion, only then can the soul accommodate, indeed tolerate, the full effulgence of the Holy Spirit. This is the reason why self-transcending experience can never be cultivated. To be sure, it is possible to force the portals of a realm of transcendent knowledge by selfish means, notably drugs and meditation techniques, but the inflow of psychic energy into the exposed personality is so great that the person cannot cope with it. He is dislodged from his present point of worldly identity before he has attained a spiritually based knowledge of eternal values. He is afforded a glimpse of the greater vision of mystical union without being shown how to attain it, and at the same time the solid foundations of his present situation are dangerously undermined. He lives in a shadow-world in which fleeting appearances are confused with ultimate reality, and his sense of inner authenticity is disrupted without any more durable focus of reality being available to replace it.
In other words, those who gain illicit entrance to the transcendent mode of being, do so at the cost of their firm base in the temporal mode. They flounder perilously in a fathom1ess ocean of desolation from which they can occasionally glimpse a greater reality but are powerless to attain it. There is a vast gulf separating the self-transcendent mode, that is eternal life, from the earth-bound dimension of personal identity. One alone unites them, being at once bridge, ferryman, and guide - the Holy Spirit. He alone, as the guide to the Word within, can bring the soul to a full knowledge of the new way. Those who attempt the lonely journey to spiritual awareness without the motivation of love and service but intent only on their own development, will never reach the promised land until they have come to a knowledge of their own darkness and impotence and are able to call on the name of God in the deepest prayer. Before this can be achieved, they may well have had to experience complete dereliction.
Here indeed is a modern version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in which the youth attempts the perilous journey to ultimate knowledge without first dedicating himself to God, Who is known to the aspiring mind as a trinity of love, truth, and beauty. Such a person has shown commendable enterprise and exemplary courage, but has unfortunately lacked humility. This comes with the dereliction; only then can the Prodigal Son return to God and learn the true way to self-transcendence, which is service to others, love of all creatures, and an unflinching self-knowledge in which, as I have already mentioned, the dark unconscious, the will, an the psychic faculty are cleansed, renewed, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. One can only comment with wry humour that the various schools of occult spiritual development that are so popular nowadays have the ultimate effect of bringing the aspirant to the original point of his departure, albeit an older, wiser person. Therefore even in this there is the finger of God's providence.
In contrast with the ill-advised occultist who has forced an entry to the world of spiritual reality and has sustained psychological imbalance and psychic invasion as a result of his impropriety, the true mystic moves to an ever-increasing personal integration as the result of the healing influence of the Holy Spirit. The validity of a self-transcending experience is the extent to which it leads the subject beyond self-concern to self-dedication and eventually self-sacrifice in an act of love for the brethren. The more full one is of the power of the Holy Spirit, the emptier is one of self-regard. The reason for this is not that the self is banished and destroyed, but that it is fulfilled and spiritualised. The true self, which is the heart of a person and identified most nearly as the soul, has at last appeared in full consciousness, no longer concealed beneath the clouds of unresolved conflicts that normally darken the unconscious. At last the personal self of everyday life is at one with the true being of the person, and his point of awareness has been raised from his own sensations, which fluctuate minute by minute, to an identification with the whole world of which he is now in truth an integral, coherent part.
The fruit of spiritual identity is joy; it is the expression of the Spirit deeply placed in the soul, which in the natural state of consciousness is unfortunately hidden by the outer cares of the person. When the identity of the self has been raised to the spiritual dimension, joy radiates from the person like the sun's rays suddenly shining through a clear chink of sky between dissipating clouds. This joy is the product of the confirmation not only of the soul's unique identity, but of its eternity - that it can never be destroyed even if the world around it is falling into chaos. The effect this realisation has on one's relationships with others is revolutionary. One depends no more on the support of any person, because one knows that the support which sustains the centre of one's life comes from the Holy Spirit. He fills the soul with life eternal and illuminates it with light that has no secondary source, but is the uncreated, primal, outflowing energy of God. Depending on no one and being immutably fixed in the centre where the will of God directs one about one's work, one is in creative relationship with everyone. Some respond harmoniously and are well disposed; others cannot comprehend the light and power that proceed from the spiritually integrated person and seek to thwart his works and finally to destroy him. But above and beyond this vortex of conflicting human emotions, unformed and inchoate, the soul of the illuminated one is in communion with God and the company of Saints in the life eternal; and it is His privilege to further the kingdom of God in the intermediate psychic realms and the material earthly ones. This is the consciousness of the Transfigured Christ, at one with the source of law and prophecy, and yet at the same time in the world surrounded by devoted, yet ignorant disciples and the dark powers of negation intent on destroying Him. Beyond time and in time simultaneously, He redeems time in eternity by His living sacrifice to the world of time. In the Transfiguration the point of time and space which is marked by a living body is raised to its origin in the world of eternal values. The Spirit has commenced His great work of raising corruptible matter, subject to all the changes of each moment in space, to incorruptible spirit where it is fit to partake fully of the divine nature to which it is heir.
This is true communion, to be in fellowship with all men - and indeed the whole creation - in the conscious presence of God. This is the full meaning of heaven. One is present everywhere at the same time so that even when one is absent in the body; one is available in the spirit. There are no demands and no expectations set on anyone in the divine community, because there is the total trust which accompanies complete openness. Thus it was in Eden before the insolence of natural human awareness had set itself apart from the totality of creation to acquire knowledge for its own advantage. At that fateful moment of isolated self-recognition, humanity realised its own nakedness, and in the fear that accompanies pride hid from the one Source who could have clothed the flesh in transfiguring radiance. What we call the Fall was the beginning of man's journey to self-awareness, but the suffering he has. inflicted on the world in the process of his self-realisation is beyond measure. Only the Incarnation could reconcile man once more with the source of his being, and demonstrate how self-mastery is achieved only in communion with God. In this revelation a new heaven was opened to mankind, and indeed it was the abode of the earliest Christian disciples despite the severe persecution levelled against them by the secular arm.
It was the tragedy of Ananias and Sapphira that they preferred limited possession of half bequeathed money to the open sharing of a heavenly community. When one enters a new way of life, one cannot obstruct the flow of the Holy Spirit with impunity. (Acts 5: I-10)
The fire of the Spirit in the heavenly realm, whether in a divinely appointed community on earth or in the life beyond death, is so fierce and consuming of all dross that only the transfigured ones can hope to survive in it. It is on this account that those who are rich in their own conceit cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. I cannot personally believe that Ananias and Sapphira were permanently lost - any more than I can bear the thought that any of God's creatures could be totally annihilated - but it is evident that they forfeited their places in that divine community by their inability to give of themselves fully. Thus many are called, but few chosen in any generation.
These teachings about the divine community are brought out in Jesus' ministry. Early on, it is recorded that His family set out to take charge of Him because people were saying that He was out of His mind. (Mark 3:21) When He was told that His mother and brothers had arrived and wanted Him to come out to them, He asked, "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?" He went on to say that whoever did the will of God was His brother, sister, or mother. (Mark 3: 31-35) This approach to personal relationships is re-echoed in His teaching about the resurrection of the dead. "When they rise from the dead, men and women do not marry; they are like angels in heaven." (Mark 12:25) None of this is meant as a denigration of personal relationships. The discipline of a loving marriage is a crucial way of spiritual development for the great majority of people. In such a relationship one's own shortcomings are pitilessly laid bare, while at the same time one gradually learns the lessons of patience and forbearance in respect of the other person. But in only a few such marriages is there that degree of trust and mutual self giving that allows each to grow fully into a person and give of himself or herself unreservedly to the greater world also in loving service. That is why at a certain stage there must be a severance of the physical relationship no matter how rewarding it may have been, so that each can grow even more fully into personal identity in the silence of bereavement. The end of this is the establishment of a new intensity of relationship with the greater body of one's fellows, while at the same time being in a closer, non-sensual communion with the loved one beyond death.
In the spiritual life there is a fellowship that transcends merely personal needs and embraces the whole world in its caring. This is how chastity should be understood. Far from being an escape from self-commitment in personal relationships, it is the way of total self-giving in all relationships, so that no one person is elevated above the other in the esteem of the one who ministers to them all. Chastity sanctifies every personal relationship and blesses it so that it ceases to be a merely temporary event but assumes the quality of eternity. Chastity exalts the person in the glory of his uniqueness, whereas promiscuity degrades the person by levelling him to his place as one of an infinite series of objects to be used for selfish motives.
The risen life of the Spirit exalts each individual to his fully unique stature, and it is consummated in a union of the one with the many in which each attains and proclaims the integrity of a proper person by shedding his isolation in the fellowship of the whole. In this fellowship death is seen to be an insubstantial shadow, eternally traversed by the shafts of loving light that proceed from one person to another. As the angelic hosts move about their appointed work in effortless precision, so do those who live in heaven relate to each other as they go about God's business of raising the spiritually dead to a new vision of transfigured glory.