Chapter 52
THE REVELATION OF DIVINE LOVE
ity, as I saw it. He sits at His Father's right hand with "right hand" meaning in the highest nobility of the Father's joy.
Now is the Spouse, God's Son, in peace with His beloved wife, who is the fair maiden of endless joy.
Now the Son, true God and true man, sits in His city in the rest and peace His Father has prepared for Him in His endless purpose. And so sits the Father in the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Father and the Son.
Chapter 52 God rejoices that He is our Father, Brother and Spouse; how the chosen have here a mixture of well-being and woe, but God is with us in three ways; how we may avoid sin but never perfectly, as in heaven.
And thus I saw that God rejoices that He is our Father; God rejoices that He is our Mother; God rejoices that He is our true Spouse and that our soul is His beloved wife. Christ rejoices that He is our Brother, and Jesus rejoices that He is our
Savior. These are the five noble joys, as I understood things, in which He wills that we rejoice, praising Him, thanking Him, loving Him and endlessly blessing Him.
All of us who shall be saved have within us during our lifetime a marvelous mixture of both well-being and woe.
We have within ourselves our risen Lord Jesus Christ, and we have within us the wretchedness and evil consequences of Adam's falling. Dying in Christ, we are everlastingly preserved, and by the touching of His grace, we are raised to a real trust in salvation.
By Adam's falling we are so broken in our feelings in different ways (by sin and by various pains by which we are made dark and, so blind), that only with difficulty can we find any comfort. But in our intentions we wait for God and faithfully trust we shall have mercy and grace — and this is His own working in us. By His goodness it [this working] opens the eye of our understanding, by means of which we have sight, sometimes more, sometimes less, as God gives us the ability
THE FOURTEENTH SHOWING
15] to accept it. Now we are raised to the one and now we are allowed to fall into the other [blindness]. And thus the mixture in us is so puzzling that it is with difficulty that we know, either of ourselves or of our fellow Christians, how we stand, because of the strangeness of these different feelings.
But that same holy assent by which we submit to God when we feel Him in truth, choosing to be with Him with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our power, makes us then hate and despise our evil stirrings and all that might be an occasion of sin, spiritual or bodily.
And yet, nevertheless, when this sweetness is hidden we fall again into blindness and so into woe and into various kinds of tribulations. But then this is our comfort, that we know in our faith that, by the virtue of Christ, Who is our preserver, we never assent to these feelings, but we grudge assent to them and endure [them] in pain and woe, praying, until time when He shows Himself to us again.
And thus we live in this mixture of feelings all the days of our life, but He wills that we trust that He is everlastingly with us, and that in three ways: He is with us in heaven as true man, and in His own person He draws us up. This was showed in His spiritual thirst. He is with us on earth, leading us. This was showed in the third revelation, where I saw God in a point. And He is with us in our soul, endlessly dwelling there, ruling and guiding us. That was showed in the sixteenth revelation, as I shall tell you.
Thus, in the servant was showed the blindness and evil consequences of Adam's falling and the wisdom and the goodness of God's Son. In the lord was showed God's compassion and pity at Adam's woe and the high nobility and endless glory that mankind has come to, by virtue of the passion and the death of His most precious Son. Therefore God rejoices greatly in Adam's falling, on account of the noble raising and the fulness of bliss that mankind has come to, surpassing what we would have had if man had not fallen.
And to see this surpassing nobility, my understanding was led thus into God at the same time that I saw the servant fall.
And thus we have matter for mourning, for our sin is the
THE REVELATION OF DIVINE LOVE
cause of Christ's pains, and we have everlasting matter for joy, for endless love made Him suffer. Therefore the creature that sees and feels the working of love by grace hates nothing but sin, for of all things, as I see it, love and hate are the stubbornest and most unmeasurable contraries.
Notwithstanding all this, I saw and understood as our Lord intended, that we cannot, in this life, keep ourselves from sin, in complete purity, the way we will be in heaven.
But we may well, by grace, keep ourselves from the sins that would lead us to endless pain, as holy Church teaches us, and reasonably avoid venial sins, to the extent of our power.
If at any time by our blindness and wretchedness we should fall, we can readily rise, knowing the sweet touching of grace, amend our lives with determination according to the gravity of the sin and the teaching of holy Church, and go forth with God in love. We shall neither, on the one hand, fall too low in spirit, inclining to despair, nor on the other hand be overreckless, as if we didn't care, but we shall merely recognize our feebleness, understanding that we may not stand alone for the twinkling of an eye except with grace preserving us, and clinging reverently to God, trusting only in Him. This is how God sees things, though men see things otherwise.
It is man's place meekly to accuse himself; it belongs to the goodness proper to our Lord God courteously to excuse Him.
There are two things that were shown in the double expression with which the lord beheld the falling of his beloved servant. The first expression appeared outwardly and was most meek and mild, with great compassion and pity. The second expression was an inward one, of endless love. Our good Lord wills that we accuse ourselves in just this way, deliberately and truly seeing and knowing our failures and all the harms that come from them, and seeing and recognizing that we can never make up for them. Together with this, He wills that we deliberately and truly see and know the everlasting love He has for us, and His abundant mercy. To see and know both together in this way, by grace, is the meek self-accusation that our good Lord asks of us. He Himself brings it about where it occurs.