The Spirit of love delights in love’s unselfish glorification of God, which turns fear’s selfish loves into God’s unselfish love, instead of returning evil for evil or revenging wrongs with wrongs. Love trusts love to overcome what opposes love, hoping often against all hope that love will overcome. Love’s patience is gentle and kind so when it meets fear’s terror of losing control, it does not retaliate, but suffers and waits. Love handles fear’s reign of terror by stepping back from all forms of fear’s will to power. Love does not react to fear’s cruelty with cruelty but may be obliged to refuse to collude with fear’s cruel abuse. Love endures trials with long-suffering, even when temptations to extremism are extreme. Love bears with betrayal even when it is demonised by fear, forgiving as it has been forgiven. Love’s glory crowns all who conceive no evil in reaction to evil, preferring peace to contention.
Love glories in God’s God-centred glorification of God, embracing fear’s self-centred incompleteness within love’s consummate completeness. When despised, love loves; when rejected love forgives, knowing that love’s glory crowns fear’s compulsive incompleteness with completeness. Love embraces sorrow, turning traumatised sobs into streaming joy. Suffering grieves and groans but love cuts through to joy even when suffering is excruciating. When forsaken by those whose love is self-interested, love may be desolate but does not despair. In the shadow of death, love embraces fear, raising fear through many hells and layers of separation. Love resurrects all who surrender to death’s embrace of death, putting death to death with Christ in his glorious resurrection.
Love neither forgets God nor is forgotten by God, because God is love. Love’s glory ascends in Christ to glory, God’s God-centred glorification of God in his Name. Love’s glory does not cling to any conditional notion of love but raises fear’s conditional loves into God’s unconditional loving embrace. Love ascribes glory to God, freeing every conditional love into God’s unconditional release of selfish love into unselfish love. Beset by desolate distress, love stands steadfast in the midst. Hells open when love descends to dissolve every confusion, heal separation and cure every division. Love descends to hell to release from hell’s dominion all who cry out in love’s Name.
Crushed between every opposite, love breaks free with paradox, opening to love’s freedom in the Spirit. Burdened to breaking point, love liberates oppression by bearing all burdens. Fear lives in terror of losing control whereas love surrenders to love’s peace, passing all understanding. The Spirit of love is the Spirit of truth in action even in the darkest depths of hell’s despair. When hells’s fires feel all-consuming, love reveals that they are actually love, love as experienced from outside love, against love. The furnaces of hell turn into realms of purifying love, curing love of self-love in the living flame of uncreated fire.
The Spirit of love is the Spirit’s love of truth expanding into love’s infinite glory and expansive openness. Fear falls short of love’s glory when it contracts into one of fear’s narrow constrictions. Love’s wisdom opens when love wonders at the expanding expanse of love’s glory. Love’s light ascends but love’s glory descends like a Bride to embrace her Bridegroom. Nothing is left out of love’s embrace. All that was renounced in ascent is embraced here by love’s glory in descent. This is the meaning of glorification. It also reveals why fear demonises glorification, for fear demonises love which it is afraid to embrace.
Wisdom wonders at the glory of love because love frees what fear binds. Love takes fear’s captivity captive. Fear’s follies fool no-one once love arises as light then glory. Fear’s endless rationalisations fall silent once love’s glory is revealed. Fear’s sorrows dissolve into gladness when love dawns. Fear’s pride is emptied of vanity, and fear itself revealed to be empty vanity, when love’s glory is unveiled. Proud confusion dissolves when love heals fear’s divisions. Love’s joy is to give and receive love. Love’s glory is to open self-love to unselfish love. Pride is overcome when fear’s delusions are cured by love. Love rejoices in heaven when fear turns and sees love radiant in the midst. Love’s first death puts fear’s death to death with rising resurrection. Love’s second death raises love from resurrection to revelatory glorification.
Wisdom discerns the glory of the Name, union of ‘I’ awareness and ‘AM’ presence, hypostatic image of God’s love of God through God in Holy Trinity. God’s love transcends egocentric and ethnocentric loves but includes them within its healing glory’s integral embrace as wholesome love of self and healthy patriotism. To love with God’s love through God, is to transcend unhealthy self-obsession whilst including healthy love of self, the wholesome individuated self that embraces what unhealthy self-love excludes. To love in God as God loves is to transcend warring nationalisms but to include peaceful patriotism, refining ethnocentric loves from narrow racism to a multi-racial embrace. To transcend is to include whereas to exclude is to set up warring divisions which drive neurotic fears into psychosis and ethnocentric fears to terrorism.
Healthy wisdom never ceases to raise fear to wholesome love, dying to unhealthy self-obsession, rising into unselfish, resurrected love. This is called love’s first death, the death of metanoia, but love’s second death opens love to mysteries of illumination and glorification that gradually transcend and include love’s embrace as we develop stage after stage. Love’s second death refers to the mystery of theosis, but there is no end to love’s glory as wisdom transcends each stage whilst including it, time after time, age after age. A global embrace is not truly global if it excludes healthy patriotism, because it has failed to distinguish warring nationalism from peaceful patriotism. Love’s glory is to transcend but also include, therefore to be truly integral at each stage. But integrity is not something fixed; it is never achieved once and for all. Love’s integral embrace expands into expanse beyond expanding expanse, glory opening from glory to glory without end. The Spirit of love never stops raising fear beyond fear because love never ceases to transcend and include what love’s glory embraces.