As the aspirant makes his final show in the theatre which is our world, standing naked for all to behold his powerlessness in the face of ignominy and despair, so he becomes aware of a body of ghostly spectators approaching him from the mists of eternity. They do not, in fact, so much move towards him as stand in firm array to watch over him. Their support is one of witness. They in their time also faced the evil powers of the world and stood steadfast, grounded in their faith as they witnessed to the reality of spiritual values: they served in love despite the blind incomprehension of all those who lived alongside them. Their victory is the form of support that they bring to their hard-pressed brother, but now it is no longer a tale but a living presence.
As the scene widens, so the encompassing forces of darkness fade into the distance, as they are gradually supplanted by people beyond measure, the whole body of mankind, and eventually the entire created universe, who watch with bated breath as the postulant surmounts the final barrier to take his place among the body of the immortals. These are the crown of the Communion of Saints, of whom even we little ones on this side of death are members, albeit mere fledglings as compared with the great saints, who have illuminated the annals of human history with a radiance of a different order from temporal power or imperial splendour. They are all of the race of martyrs, even if some were spared the terrible death of torture at the hands of an encompassing evil power that is the classical end of martyrdom. All bore witness to the noble face of God in mankind in their victory over the limitations of the mortal body and the corruption of the social institution in which they found themselves. Their witness inspired the human race and played its part in the civilization of the world.
St Irenaeus said that the glory of God is a man fully alive. The paradigm of this fully alive person is the saint; in Christian thought Jesus is the supreme witness. The affirmation that our developed western world needs so desperately is that the human is a spiritual being; in the eastern world this is accepted as a matter of fact, but the squalid poverty of the masses belies this comfortable assumption. The martyrs have all in their own witness given proof of human spirituality, as they moved onwards to claim the prize at the end of the day: the pearl of great price for the sake of which they had not spared themselves or withheld their very lives.
The victorious ones pass without form from the life of the world to the void of eternity. This is the great cloud of unknowing which supported the Israelites day by day in the wilderness, and into which the spiritual body of Jesus advanced and was taken up as he left the limited atmosphere of our world at the time of his ascension to the centre of the divine power. "A grain of wheat remains a solitary grain unless it falls into the ground and dies; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest." We have considered these words before; now at last their impetus attains its full impact. The witnesses to the truth have disappeared from view in their mortal form, only to reappear enshrined in the light of eternity. Theirs is a radiance that can never be extinguished because at the centre of their being there lies the pearl. From it the Light of the World shows himself. The saint now has the pearl enshrined within himself, and he has been transfigured: all that was mortal and perishable is now taken up in the eternal radiance of the pearl. Each of God's creatures has the potentiality of becoming a pearl in its own right; it is the privilege of the rational agent, in our world the human being, to work towards the transformation of the whole of creation so that it may actualize its fullness, even to becoming a pearl in the glory of God. Thus all is taken up into the precious gift of God, so as to become a fulfilment of that very gift. "Then the Lord shall become king over all the earth; on that day the Lord shall be one Lord and his name the one name" (Zechariah 14.9).
When the saint attains his apotheosis, when the pearl illuminates him to a transparency that reveals God, the law of love attains its fulfilment. Then at last it becomes impossible to set oneself against the person who does one harm; it becomes a matter of course to turn the other cheek to the assailant, to give freely when called on to do so, and to accept without demur the demands of the stronger party. But now all resistance is gone, all sense of grievance annulled, as one flows out quite spontaneously in love to one's enemy and prays for one's persecutor. When one is the pearl, one has a single burning desire: to bring the pearl to others also: "You are light for all the world . . . And you, like the lamp, must shed light among your fellows, so that when they see the good you do, they may give praise to your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5.14-16). What would have been impossible to the unaware person, and painfully jarring to the one on the path, now becomes an inevitable attitude in a new way of living. The saints in this world and the next work with constant devotion towards the transformation of society and the enlightenment of its individual members.
We find that the pearl resides in the spirit of the soul, in the depth of the personality of each one of us. When it is claimed, it shines radiantly within us, and from us to the world. It is seen by those around us in our daily work, but sheds a universal light during our times of prayer. And eventually prayer should never leave us, attaining constancy and ardour even during the most exacting work in the world.