The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (50 page)

Well, I haven’t spent my adult life living for a cause I daren’t die for. But I don’t see death coming as easily as I’d imagined. Sir Gerald was right, after all. I don’t feel a bit chirpy. I tremble... I tremble, I trust, I wait... I wait, I trust, I tremble...

Questions and doubts I’d long supposed settled suddenly reemerge:

Is What I’m made of truly death proof? Is it enough to tell my headsman I’ve beaten him to it, and long ago done his job? Is the One who never let me down incapable of ever doing so? Is This which is a thousand times more Me than myself, which is the Soul of my soul, which is my only Knowable yet as beyond me as the unimaginable fringes of space-time - is This forever mine? Forever me? Come on! Does the fact that this Artesian Well never ran dry mean it will never do so? Is my Help in ages past my
certain
Hope in ages to come,
secula seculorum?

Horrified, ashamed of raising such questions one minute short of midnight, I pull myself together and take heart. Am I not so intimately caught up in Him who is my darling - so seized of the joy which is His own astonishment at Himself, so privy to His secrets, so madly and so sanely in love with Him - that He cannot let me perish like a mayfly or a solar system? Does He not find my child’s cry ‘Only in Your arms am I safe at Home!’ irresistible? Can He afford
not
to clasp me to His heart for ever?

Words, words, words. They come up unbidden like marsh gas from a swamp, like whirling-devils in the desert, like stinging nettles on a rubbish dump - and are about as significant. To bandy words with Him, to verbalize at all about Him, is to play the game of separation. All words are infected with the virus of two-ness. And where there are two, there’s trembling. Where there are two, there’s terror.

My remedy is to
see.
See the One.

I look out at these all-embracing arms, ending in those little hands. I look up at those little feet.

They are the nailed hands and feet of the One who loved me and gave Himself for me. All of Himself. All, for ever and ever.

I look in at the One Who can be seen by no other.

It would be nonsense and heartbreak and blasphemy not to be Him.

APPENDICES

The 8 x 8-fold Plebeian Path

This is the Map of the Path referred to chapters 19 and 20. The best time to go through it in detail is after you have finished reading my account of the Trial. It will then remind you of many of the places we have visited.

I call this Path plebeian - and not noble, and certainly not Aryan - because nearly all humans travel nearly all of it anyway. And because even the last two stages are open to anyone who’s desperate enough to take the low road that God has fully sign-posted and made perfectly obvious.

With de Caussade - that seasoned traveller on the low road - I invite you to

Come, not only to look at a map of the spiritual country, but to possess and to walk in it without fear of losing your way. Come, not to study the history of God’s divine action, but to be the subject of its operation… He will never disclose Himself in the shape of that exalted image to which you so vainly cling.