Chapter 55
THE FOURTEENTH SHOWING
the virtues of the Holy Spirit. This working makes us Christ's children and Christian in our loving and living.
Chapter 55 Christ is our Way, leading and presenting us to the Father; as soon as the soul is infused into the body, mercy and grace work; and how the Second Person took our sensuality to deliver us from double death.
And thus Christ is our Way, securely leading us in His laws, and Christ in his body powerfully bears us up into heaven. For I saw that Christ, having within Himself all of us who shall be saved by Him, gloriously presents us to His Father in heaven. This present His Father receives most thankfully, and courteously gives it back to His Son, Jesus
Christ. And this gift and working is joy to the Father, bliss to the Son and delight to the Holy Spirit.
Of all the things that are proper for us to do, it is the greatest delight to our Lord that we rejoice in this joy which is in the blessed Trinity on account of our salvation. This was seen in the ninth showing, which speaks at greater length of this matter. And notwithstanding all our feelings of woe or wellbeing, God wills that we understand and believe that we exist more truly in heaven than on earth.
Our faith comes from the natural love of our soul, from the clear light of our reason, and from the steadfast mind that we receive from God in our first creation. At the very time our soul is breathed into our body, when we are made sensual, immediately mercy and grace begin to work, caring for us and keeping us safe by pity and love. In this working, the Holy Spirit forms in our faith the hope that we shall again come up above to our substance, into the virtue of Christ, increased and fulfilled through the Holy Spirit.
Thus I understood that man's sensuality is grounded in nature, in mercy and in grace. This grounding enables us to receive gifts that lead us to endless life. For I saw most surely that our substance is in God. I also saw that God is in our
THE REVELATION OF DIVINE LOVE
sensuality, for in the same respect that our soul is made sensual, the city of God is ordained for it from eternity. Unto this city He comes, and He shall never move away from it, for God is never out of the soul in which He shall dwell blissfully without end. This will be explained in the sixteenth showing, which says that Jesus shall never move from the place
He takes in our soul.
All the gifts that God can give to a creature, He has given to His Son, Jesus, for us. These gifts He, dwelling in us, has enclosed within Himself, until the time that we are grown up and mature — our soul with our body and our body with our soul. Either of them can accept help from the other until we are brought to our full stature through the workings of nature. And then, in the ground of nature, by the working of mercy, the Holy Spirit graciously breathes into us gifts leading to endless life.
And thus was my understanding led by God to see in Him and to recognize, to understand and to know, that our soul, known and loved from without beginning, is a created trinity, similar to the uncreated blessed Trinity, and joined to the maker in its making as was said previously. This sight was most sweet and marvelous to behold, peaceful and restful, sure and delectable.
And because of the glorious union that was thus made by God between the soul and the body, it had and ought to be that mankind should be rescued from double death. This restoration could never be accomplished until the Second Person of the Trinity, to whom the highest part had been joined in the first creation, had taken on the lower part of mankind.
These two parts, the higher and lower, were in Christ, who is only one Soul. The higher part was ever one in peace with God, in full joy and bliss. The lower part, which is sensuality, suffered for the salvation of mankind. These two parts were seen and felt in the eighth showing, in which my body was filled full of the feeling and the spirit of Christ's passion and His dying.
Furthermore, with this there was a subtle feeling and a secret inward sight of the higher part, and that was shown