Chapter 49
THE REVELATION OF DIVINE LOVE
mercy of God and His forgiveness exist to slacken and shrink our wrath.
Chapter 49 Our life is grounded in Love, without which we perish; yet still God is never angry, but in our wrath and sin He mercifully preserves us and makes a treaty of peace with us, rewarding our tribulations.
It was a great wonder to the soul, continuously shown in everything and watched with great diligence, that our Lord
God, in Himself, cannot forgive, because He cannot be angry — it is impossible. For it was shown that our life is entirely grounded and rooted in Love, and without Love we cannot live. And therefore to the soul, which because of His special grace sees this much of the lofty, marvelous goodness of God and sees that we are endlessly made one with Him in love, that God should be angry is the most impossible thing that could be, for wrath and friendship are two contraries. He who shrinks and destroys our wrath and makes us meek and mild, we ought and have to believe is ever, in the same love, meek and mild, which is contrary to wrath. For I saw most certainly that where our Lord appears, peace is accepted and wrath has no place.
I saw no kind of wrath in God, neither for the short term nor for the long, for truly, as I saw it, if God could be angry even a touch, we should never have life, nor place, nor being.
As true as it is that we have our being from the endless power of God, from His endless wisdom and from His endless goodness, it is just as true that we have our preservation from the endless power of God, from His endless wisdom and from His endless goodness.
Though we feel in ourselves wrath, wretched debates and strifes, we are mercifully in all ways fully enclosed in the mildness of God, in His meekness, in His benignity and in His obedience. I saw most certainly that all our endless friendship, our place, our life and our being is in God, for the same endless Goodness that preserves us when we sin so that
THE FOURTEENTH SHOWING
we do not perish, continually makes treaties of peace in us against our wrath and our contrary falling, and makes us see our need to seek God strenuously, with true dread, that we may have forgiveness with a grace-filled desire for our salvation.
We may not be blissfully saved until we are truly in peace and love, for that is our salvation. And though we, by the wrath and contrariness in us, are now in such tribulation, unease and woe as falls to our blindness and frailty, yet we are securely safe by God's merciful preservation so that we do not perish. But we are not blissfully safe in our possession of endless joy until we are entirely in peace and love, that is to say, completely pleased with God, with all His works and with all His judgments, and loving and peaceable with our selves, with our fellow Christians and with everything God loves as Love delights in it. God's goodness accomplishes this in us.
Thus I saw that God is our true peace and He is our reliable preserver when we are unpeaceful. He continually works to bring us into endless peace. And thus, when we, by the working of mercy and grace, are made meek and mild, we are completely safe. The soul is made suddenly one with God when it is truly at peace in itself, for in Him no wrath is found.
And thus I saw how we are entirely in peace and in love.
We find no contrariness, and no kind of permission for the contrariness that is now in us to act. Our Lord God, of His goodness, makes this most profitable for us, for that contrariness is the cause of our tribulations and all our woe, and our
Lord Jesus takes these and sends them up to heaven. There they are made sweeter and more delectable than the heart can imagine or the tongue can tell. When we come to that place, we shall find them ready, all turned into fairness itself and endless honors. Thus, God is our steadfast ground, and He shall be our complete bliss and make us unchangeable, as He is, when we are there.
THE REVELATION OF DIVINE LOVE
Chapter 50 How the chosen soul was never dead in the sight of God; of a doubt upon the same; and three things emboldened her to ask of God the understanding of it.
And in this life mercy and forgiveness are our way, and they lead us evermore to grace. And going by the tempests and sorrows we, for our part, fall into, we are often dead, as man judges things on earth. But in the sight of God the soul that shall be saved was never dead and never shall be.
But still I wondered here and marveled with all the diligence of my soul, thinking thus, "Good Lord, I see You, Who are Truth itself, and I know in truth that we sin grievously all the time and are worthy of much blame. I may neither depart from the knowing of this truth nor see Your showing us any kind of blame. How can this be?"
For I knew by the common teaching of holy Church and by my own feeling, that the blame for our sins hangs continuously upon us from the first man up to the time that we come up to heaven. In this was my marveling, that I saw our
Lord God showing us no more blame than if we were as pure and holy as angels are in heaven.
Between these two contraries my reason was greatly belabored by my blindness. I could have no rest, for fear His blessed presence should pass from my sight and I should be left ignorant of how He looks at us in our sin. For either I ought and had to see in God that sin was entirely done away with, or else I had and ought to see in God how He sees it, by which I could truly know how I ought properly to see sin and the way in which we are blamed.
My longing endured as I continued to gaze at Him, and yet I could have no patience, because of my great anxiety, fear and perplexity.
I was thinking, "If I take it that we are not sinners and are not blameworthy, it seems that I would err and fail to know this truth. And if it is true that we are sinners and blameworthy, good Lord, how can it, then, be that I cannot see this truth? In it are my God and my Maker, in Whom I desire