Hidden Wisdom

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Hidden wisdom bears witness to the loving but hidden glory of the Holy Name, a union of uncreated awareness and uncreated presence, God’s ‘I’ of wisdom and his ‘AM’ of glory, but this Seraphic and Cherubic mystery conceals itself from fear, but also from shallow, profane scrutiny.  God is beautiful and loves beauty, the light of his wisdom embracing the beauty of his glory, revealing radiant love.  Since God is always love, revealing love’s union of wisdom and glory, then God’s revelatory Name is also love, for his energies of wisdom and glory are the saving awareness and presence of his love.  God’s energies of wisdom and glory are God’s essence in action as love.  The hidden essence of Godhead is not against love or there would be a demonic subversion of love concealed behind God’s energies of wisdom and glory.  As love, God’s Name is the union of his saving awareness and his liberating presence in our midst.  Wisdom discerns the glory of this love, unveiled through God’s saving yet mysterious Name.  God’s many qualities reveal many names of love, but all such names stem from ‘I AM,’ the Name of names, ‘I AM’ the Father, through ‘I AM’ the Son, in ‘I AM’ the Holy Spirit.  This Name, though hidden to fear, love unveils as God’s saving grace of wisdom and glory.  

Love’s hidden wisdom of glory is the completeness for which all incompleteness yearns, love’s boundless ocean into which all love’s living streams eventually flow.  Love secretly indwells all as it flows through all to God.  The injunction to love as we are loved is an injunction to love God with all our heart, but it is also an injunction to love our neighbour as ourselves.  To love with all our heart is to love God who mysteriously indwells our heart.  To love our neighbour as ourselves is to love God who invisibly indwells our neighbour, one ‘I AM,’ one God, one love, one living communion in God’s living flame of love.  The Spirit of love’s wisdom and glory is one spirit with God in our midst and so one spirit also with God in those we love.  As wisdom, God is Bridegroom and as glory, Bride, awareness and presence conjoined in God’s Name.  The beloved is loved by ‘I AM,’ just as ‘I AM’ is loved in the beloved, because Christ is always in the midst of every lover and every beloved.  ‘I AM’ is the hidden, uncreated ground of self and other, for no subverting antagonist intrudes between God and what is God’s.  God’s hidden Cherubic embrace of wisdom and glory indwells each and all.

All revelation, whether it is wisdom, law or prophecy, is centred here in the hidden wisdom and glory of love, but when this glory is revealed, all else but love falls away.  The literal forms of Holy Orthodox tradition are all reflections of this Spirit of hallowing love.  What God gives freely as the wisdom and glory of love, lovers see as beauty, seers see as truth and saints as holiness.  The musician receives as harmony what the sage sees as hidden wisdom embracing glory in the midst.  Love has many names but God’s Name of names reveals them all.  The uncreated wisdom of love’s glory in his Name reveals God from God in God, unveiling hallowed realms of Holy Trinity.  Love of enemies is the criterion of all truth, as Saint Silouan the Hagiorite bore witness.  Difference is not division when love’s glory is revealed.  Difference may be marked by dissent but dissent is not enmity.  Samaritans may be different but if there is just one who binds up my wounds, that difference is not enmity.   Strangers can be angels welcomed unawares, if awareness is present, just as angels can be messengers of God if presence is awake and aware of saving presence.  Hidden wisdom welcomes angels when glory is welcomed home as love hidden in the midst.

Wisdom remains hidden to fear even when love’s glory is revealed.  But enemies befriend enemies when love’s glory embraces them.  When the eye of the heart opens, the hardened heart is cured by love.  Enemies condemn each other to the hells their condemning minds engender, but saints like Sophrony the Hesychast condemn, instead, their own proud mind to hell.  They are freed from prisons of pride when they trust love.  The glory from which pride is forever falling short is restored by humble love.  All lurking shadows are dissolved when uncreated light is embraced.  Pride needs enemies to be pride, but love of enemies does not need enemies to be love.  Wisdom embraces love of enemies to be rid of enmity, freeing love from pride, because blessed is the Name of ‘I AM’ in each and all.  Love endures fear’s terrors for God’s sake, God who is love, hidden in all.  Selfish love, ruled by fear, hates evil, rejoicing in what it defines as good.  Unselfish love raises terror from fear of evil to rejoice in unselfish love.  Wisdom remains innocent, like a dove, whilst including a serpent’s cunning with regard to evil’s subtlety.   Falls appear to defile and deform glory but glory itself remains glory, ascribing glory to God, beyond every fall.  Good and evil tear apart the heart whereas hidden wisdom and invisible glory heal it.

Hidden wisdom initiates the wholesome heart into mysteries of glory.  Baptism in the Spirit includes the fire that consumes confusion, called the first death, but also the light that heals division, called the second death, together with the glory that completes resurrection in age after age.  The Eucharist gives thanks that union in uncreated light is communion, revealed through the hallowed Name in uncreated glory.  The hidden wisdom of the slaughtered, suckling Lamb is shared but not divided, completing the liturgical rite as wisdom’s hidden liturgy, healing the heart.  The bread of presence is completed with the wine of awareness, the body of Christ with the blood of his deifying life.  Awareness conjoins with presence in the Eucharist, extended as prayer of the Name in the heart.  ‘I AM’ unveils God through God, in God, in every timeless moment.  Holy Trinity is God’s Kingdom come when God’s Name is hallowed, God’s hidden awareness embracing the mystery and glory of his presence.

Hidden wisdom bears witness that love’s hidden glory is the root and truth of all loves, purifying selfish loves, illumining unselfish loves.  Wholesome love includes a healthy love of self in God, glorifying God’s unselfish love of God through God, in Holy Trinity.  God’s Name is invisibly engraved on the foreheads of all who are crowned by its hidden glory.  Sin deceives and slays the heart by parodying the good.  It sows confusion to reap division.  Evils were never committed because they were evil but because they were falsely regarded as good. The worst of evils were always perceived to be good by those who committed them.  Satan pretends to be an angel of light, parodying wisdom, usurping glory.  Love, however, does not confuse an evil with the person who commits it, loving the person to release them from evil.  But the insinuations of confusion would have no hold on the heart if union was not not already secretly written there, proof of the heart’s capacity for deifying communion.  Idolatrous confusion is unconscious until luminous communion is revealed.  Nobody intends to confuse the created self with God.   What hidden wisdom called the fall from glory can always be reversed by love’s glory, glory’s ineffable restoration to glory. 

Hidden wisdom unveils the glory of love, which is gentle and kind when it points out confusion to heal division.  If love’s glory sometimes wisely appears fierce, it is because hardened hearts refuse to listen to kindly love.  Scripture calls fierce love divine wrath, but never forgets that God’s wrath is really God’s love, love’s wisdom thwarted and so love’s glory in fierce mode.  Fear still reads Scripture through the eye of ancient fears, seeing retribution and punishment where love’s wisdom sees generous grace and glory embracing boundless love.  Scripture embraces fear even when, in it’s wisdom, it transcends fear, leaving fear plenty of texts to encourage fear whilst fear is still refusing love.  Fear that demonises love is, of course, unknowingly demonic but it is never overcome by retaliatory demonising terror, but won over only by costly, forgiving love.  Love’s hidden war, the war of the slaughtered Lamb, is already won in God, but love can never be imposed on fear because love never destroys freedom, for love is wed to freedom as wisdom with glory.  Love is never embittered or ruthless even when fear demonises love, but it may be that sometimes fierce love, alone, can be heard by the closed and hardened heart.  Wisdom remains hidden to fear even as glory is revealed through love.  Love’s mysteries remain hidden mysteries even when they are revealed to wisdom, because wisdom is hidden until fear begins to embrace love.  Love’s hidden glory lies in the generosity of love’s saving grace, grace opening to increasing grace, wisdom opening to increasing glory, unveiling hidden glory to glory without end.