(Cover image from Free Bible Images website)
It’s the end of a long day and I’m tucking my little one into bed. This is the time where we lie down next to each and talk quietly together. I share things close to my heart and of things that I hope will prepare them for their life ahead. Through the gentleness of stories, I talk of Love and hope and truth and trust. I speak of the Word as His Love.
Tonight, my little one asks “ Mummy what does glorification mean? I heard someone say that the Lord went through glorification? What is that?”
Well my love, the story often feels like a fairy tale –as something that is comforting and reassuring to hear – it has a happy ending. It brings us peace to know that the Lord loves us so much that He willingly made Himself one of us, He made Himself a humble, fallible human and then faced the enormity and onslaught of the fury of the full force of the hells. Just for us. To save us from ourselves.
Gosh, that sounds a bit complicated Mummy.
Yes it does, doesn’t it ….
And just like a fairy tale, it can often feel hard to grasp and see how it relates to our own development, to our own inner process… it feels mystical and magical and so also fantastical and intangible.
But just like with fairy tales, we must look within it to see how we may apply the principles it teaches to our life.
We must allow the image to show us the true Self within the mirror it holds up for us to look into.
I’d like to hear the story Mummy.
Yes, and I think its time to tell you, so let’s begin now ….
Once upon a time, long ago, the people of the earth lived in harmony with the Lord. They knew that everything around them was connected and part of the universal Love that sustained them and gave them life. They could see this Love in everything around them and also in each other. They didn’t know how they knew this and they didn’t question it.
But by and by, things started changing. They started paying more attention to what their physical senses in the world were telling them. Once this happened, it led to questions about things that they had always accepted without understanding why. And then this led to them placing more emphasis in their daily rituals of worship and more emphasis in the body and their experience in their senses.
As time went on, more and more focus started to be placed in these rituals and the delight of living in the senses of the world around them and within them. It directed them into exploring many new paths of scientifics and knowledges and understanding. There was a great expansion in thought and the affections for thinking from what they could taste, touch, see, hear and smell.
But it also brought with it an awakening to things of destruction as well, as this new delight in the senses could also be used to gratify the own self, instead of loving each other. Over time, a belief in the idea that life existed from living in the sensual world around them, became stronger than the original feeling of life being a gift from Love itself. They became less able to see the Lord in each other, or the Lord in their idols, or the Lord in their rituals, or the Lord in their senses, as this new way of being became stronger and stronger.
The Divine being of Love saw this and knew that it was time to descend into this physical world to offer a new hope and a new experience of Love that could meet and speak to level of the senses.
It knew that it must come in a form that was gentle and appealed to things of innocence, as something non-threatening. So it came in the form of a baby boy, in the arms of his mother and father, surrounded by animals and many travelled from near and far to visit him. This boy grew into a man and as he did he started to discover the Divine Love within him that was longing to be brought forth and unfolded and make him truly human. But he also discovered resistance to this Love. And so his journey of offering Love to others and healing and compassion also involved allowing this Love to offer healing and compassion to himself – to the inner struggles and temptations that occurred as the evils and hells that opposed this Love, fought back with a steady onslaught of fury.
Little by little, the things that he had inherited from his human mother that were finite and not from the Father that had sent him, were put off. The Love descending down from his soul sought to create a new flesh for his body in which the senses of the world could be experienced from Love rather than the self centred love that he had inherited from his mother. So there were two humans. The first human he was born into, was like a pretend human and it provided an external flesh for his body that was from his mother who belonged to the world of the senses. It looked human but its flesh was dead and decaying because it only loved itself and lived from the idea that its life was created by what it could feel from the senses in the world. The second human was real because it lived from Love, from the internal that had been given from his Father. As the boy, now a man, fought and suffered in the battles against the darkness that threatened to destroy the Love, the dead flesh from the pretend human gradually was sloughed off and a new flesh formed to cover this Love and so created a real human.
The little boy, now a man, was healed and reformed.And the new human that unfolded was glorious and beautiful to behold.
And now… He stands before us all, at every moment, with His arms outstretched, beckoning us to let Him do the same Work in us. He offers the promise of eternal Love and Life. We are filled with such a deep sense of being cared for because He loved us so much that he was willing to step into the fire of the darkest most horrible evils to fight to save us. To fight for our freedom. He is our Hero, our Saviour, the true divine Human.
My little one falls back against the pillow and sighs with a dreamy look on their face.
“You were right Mummy – that’s such a beautiful story! It’s so incredible and magical. It almost doesn’t seem real. How do I know it’s real? How does it relate to my life? How does it relate to me?
Well my darling, we must open our hearts and let the Lord hold the mirror for us … to shine on the image within the story and listen to what it teaches…
When we are born and enter into this world we start out like those people from long ago. We see love and innocence in the world around us and we don’t question it, it is just something that we live from in our hearts. And then as we start to get older, we start to become aware of the world around us. We start developing likes and dislikes; for food that we like, for different things we like to look at, the different things we like to listen to, for people we like to spend time with, for things that make us feel good and happy and things that give us pleasure. We start to develop a sense of life and we start to build a sense of self from this, which we call our personal identity, or our personality, or how we define ourselves. We say it is what makes us who we are, what makes you ‘you’ and me ‘me’.
Then, we when get a little bit older yet, our mind starts to expand, and we question things and challenge ideas that our parents or our teachers have taught us. We start to really embrace living in the world with all its facts and knowledges and pleasures that life can offer us.
And we might live this way for quite a while.
But from the moment we are born, the Lord is using these opportunities in our life to build memories that are like vessels or storage units. He stores up all the good things of His love in them and they progressively becoming plentiful, growing in size until the time comes for His love to descend and open them up and bring out the contents into use.
Along the way, as we have been gathering these storage vessels, we have gathered others too that don’t hold the Lord’s love in them, but instead they hold things that are self-serving and only focus on that is good for ourselves without thought for others. When the Lord’s love descends and we awaken to it, these vessels of self-love get in the way and create resistance. And so they need to be opened so that we can peer inside and let the Lord know that we understand what it is we are looking at. This is very difficult and it hurts to see it and we feel the same despair and unhappiness that the Lord felt when he was suffering and fighting for us. But if are brave, like He was, and we trust in Love, then this is like handing over the power to the Lord to allow Him to remove these vessels out of our sight.These vessels are like the dead decaying flesh on the pretend human. They make us believe that life comes from the world we live in that we can see, touch, feel, hear and taste. But once these vessels are sloughed off then the vessels of His Love can be opened more and more. These vessels are like the new flesh from the Father that forms around Love and makes us truly human.
“Hmmmm . All this talk of creating humans and new flesh makes me think of the creation story about the first humans – Adam and Eve. Why is that mummy?”
Well little one, first we need to think about what it means to be human.
The human form can be known when love marries with its wisdom and produces use. So this is when we take the Lord’s Love in our heart and the truth from His Word and we apply it in our life and we see that it is good. The truth from His love becomes living for us. The Adam and Eve story is like this too.
Adam is a man, we will call him the masculine and Eve is a woman, so we will call her the feminine. Our first rational understanding of life is based in the world of the senses. It loves to acquire information and what it believes is truth. But this is the pretend human. This is the sense of self that has no real life in it. This is what the masculine is born into. Yes it is a sense of self, and yes it has the ability to think rationally, but it is self-serving. This sense of self must be transferred out of the masculine and into the feminine. This is the rib in the story that is taken from Adam, out of his body, out of his flesh. This is the dead flesh of the vessels that don’t have the Lord in them and need to be taken from out of our sight. We must be willing to sacrifice what we love, even if it feels like it’s our very own flesh and blood. We must be wiling to let the Lord take out the rib and transfer it.
The second sense of self or the second rational understanding is formed in the feminine. The rib is taken out of the masculine and a woman is formed around it – it is her flesh that envelops the rib. The new flesh is the vessels that have the Love of the Lord in them. This is the flesh from the Father, from Love, whilst the masculine’s flesh is the flesh from Mary, from love of self only. So Eve is the gift given to Adam so that they may both become one flesh and one life that is a real human. And then babies come forth in the womb of Eve and then those babies make more babies. Life is constantly being created in this process. That is the eternal Life He promises.
“Gosh there is so much to try and remember Mummy. And so many ideas in there that I don’t think I understand yet. How does the Lord’s Love descend into us? And how do we know what is truth and where do we find it?”
Oh, well … it starts to get more in depth from here on in little one. This next part is more for the grown ups. I shall tell you about it but perhaps just listen and take in what you can. Listen to the love in my voice as I speak the words and think of them as vessels that you can store away until they are ready to be opened.
At some point in your adult life you will hear the Lord calling you; it may be early in your life, it may be in the middle, it may not happen until later. But it will happen. It will feel like a call to seek connection to something more than what you have, than what you feel. It will feel like a call to seek truth and want to really know it. It will be a call to you to enter the Word because that is truth itself. The Word is the flesh of the human, of the Divine Human.
But every time we enter the Word we experience it sensually first. We experience it as the human from Mary, as something that is finite and tangible and as something we can touch and hold and examine. The words in its pages touch us, confuse us, excite us, inspire us … they appeal to our senses in our spiritual body, in the life of our thoughts and affections, in the life of our mind. But they also make contact with the storage vessels. Like the baby boy, the words appear innocent and non-threatening and we allow them to enter into our minds. And like the baby, the words are an innocent childlike form of the senses that start to grow into a man within our minds. The information and knowledge that we are reading and processing, starts to expand our thoughts and our affections, as the influx of the Lord’s Love flows down into our mind’s through the concepts and the very words themselves. This is the opening up of the storage vessels.
Up until this point in our life, we have been oblivious to the fact that there was another way to view things. We may have had momentary thoughts about it but we were happy exploring the world of the senses and its delights. And these are indeed a necessary part of the process. Without these vessels that we have gathered along the way, there would be nothing to store the Lord’s love in, and also just as importantly, store that which opposes it. You see, it is actually the process of moving through the resistance, the resistance to the Lord as the Word descending into our lives – that allows more of the vessels of Love to be opened. In seeing where He is not present, it strengthens our seeing and knowing of where He is. It is the presence of the resistance and our struggle with it, that opens us up to the specific form of the human we are to enter into.
So we call this opening up of vessels an ‘awakening’ – it is our awakening to spiritual life. The things that have sat in storage all those years are now being opened up and let out to fulfil their original purpose.
The things that contain the Lord’s love are released and meet with the Word’s truth as it comes into our awareness, flowing in through what we are learning and applying in our life.
But at the same time the other vessels….. they feel like Pandora’s box because they release all the things that stand in opposition- the sickness and disease in our minds of what loving only the self can do to our life, leading to decay and death.
So there is the process of the flesh of the pretend human, the exteriors, being put off and then there is also the process of things more interior – of seeing what the human from Mary really is and what the human from the Father is. The more interior work is the work of distinction and separation, of seeing the difference in the two sense of selves.
This distinction and the need to separate is what propels us into the wilderness of temptation. The flesh doesn’t want to let go of the rib – it is attached to it. It is difficult to give up ownership of it, to give up the sense of self that we have spent so long relying on and depending on and believing in, in the life that we thought was ours through our own intelligence.
We see the same struggle in the mind shift from reading things in the Word literally, to seeing them representing instead higher spiritual concepts or principles. There is a strong pull to want to read things at face value, even when they don’t make sense because to read them from internal processes requires an acknowledgement that the Lord is the Process and that we have no ownership on it at all. When this happens the letter of the Word then becomes the servant to internal senses rather than external ones.
So the externals from the human from Mary – the life in the external senses of the Text or our lives in the senses of the world, then becomes known as the servant because it allows us to be conscious of the fact that we are alive. It allows for distinction and thus separation that leads into the new externals of the real human being provided for. The Word provides new vessels of truth that love can join with and flow into and the Text of the Word is seen to be the new flesh once the Lord is recognised as the internal of the Word. Our life is seen in Him and therefore life is eternal and the Word once seen as finite is now acknowledged as Divine and therefore infinite.
The Word as we enter into it and it into us, over and over, is perpetually sloughing off the externals that can’t serve the internal of the Lord, of Love, and is building new flesh or externals for us, for the new real human that is forming forever more.
Are you still awake little one?
Yes, only just Mummy …
How about I read you something from the Word…. it always explains things better than I can.
Yes, I’d like that, read it to me please…
No shape has He nor honour
when we shall see Him,
and no appearance nor loveliness that we will covet Him.
Despised is He,
and shunned by men,
a man of pains
and knowing illness.
yet Yahweh desires to crush Him,
and He causes Him to be wounded.
Should you place His soul for a guilt approach,
He shall see a seed.
He shall lengthen His days,
and the desire of Yahweh shall prosper in His hand.
From the toil of His soul shall He see light.
And He shall be satisfied
by His knowledge.
My righteous Servant shall justify many,
and with their depravities shall He be burdened.
(Isaiah, 53:2-3,10-11, CLV)
It’s like making chocolate cake isn’t it Mummy?
How so love?
Well, it shows us all the parts and how the cake is made and there is something comforting about that.
Yes, there is comfort in the Process. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t effort to make the cake and that sometimes it can be difficult; if we don’t have the right ingredients or we miss something out or we get called away in the middle of it and we forget what we were up to when we return, or if we just aren’t feeling like we want to make the cake or if we make it and it doesn’t cook properly or we burn it and have to start again. It can even make us cry and feel sad sometimes.
But there is something very dependable and solid in knowing that it’s the same process each time. It feels safe and reliable and something we can trust in.
Gosh Mummy, it still seems so complicated and there is still so much that I don’t understand and don’t know.
Yes my love. But there is awe and joy in that fact too.
Yes Mummy, there is.
I think I shall sleep now.
Sweet dreams little one.
May His love descend and envelope you in peace.