Mother Julian of Norwich was shown that love was our Lord’s meaning; ‘I AM,’ love’s glory, the ground of all our beseeching (Revelation of Love ch. 86). Like Dame Julian, desert wisdom questions the enduring meaning of being, searching out the hidden ground of uncreated, deifying grace. Prophecy transmits the Name so that prayer may receive its gracious gifts, opening being to the enduring meaning of ‘I AM.’ The Holy Spirit shares Christ’s revelation of the Father’s love, ground of unceasing prayer in the heart, source of meaning beyond all definitions of conceptual intention. Mother Julian questioned Christ crucified because it is the wisdom of the Cross which unveils Christ’s deepest intention, the mystery of glory opening to the light of grace, the glory of long-suffering love that desires to save all. Love is the ultimate meaning of being, ground of all prophecy and prayer. Love is the all-embracing intention of the Name, revelation of God’s saving awareness and healing presence. Love is awareness of presence that awakens wisdom, and presence of glory that wisdom reveals.
Love is God’s meaning, so when wisdom loves glory, love’s awareness beholds the meaning of love’s presence, revealing love to be the hidden meaning of God’s saving Name. God’s ‘I’ awareness embraces his ‘AM’ presence revealing love, love’s deifying union communicating love’s glorified communion. Love is ground of the Spirit’s unceasing prayer in the heart, the meaning of union and communion unveiled by the Father, communicated by the Son. Love’s glory, being the deifying life of Holy Trinity, overcomes powers of confusion to sustain union and cures powers of division to ensure communion. Falling from glory, fear springs from confusion that dreads delusion, separating awareness from presence, conditioning countless divisions. Rejecting glory, fear conceals a hidden terror that dread represses, spawning endless half-conscious dualisms. Love’s glory remains hidden through long ages of unhealed fear, terror unconsciously repressed in hardened hearts until wisdom embraces glory in the light of the Cross of God-centred, long-suffering love.
Glorification is the desert’s witness to the completeness of love already inherent in uncreated illumination, embracing wisdom’s awakening to love with glory’s all-healing grace. Wisdom discerns love’s glory to be the ultimate meaning of being, healing primordial terror and fear’s terrorising violence with a homely embrace of ineffable love. Wisdom’s light unveils love’s glory at the heart of terror when self-centred survival is threatened, of fear when self-centred safety is under attack, of violence when self-centred control is lost. In the extremities of catastrophic loss, when disintegration degenerates into extremism, love’s God-centred glory is revealed, opening being to healing meanings beyond predication, transcending the narrow, shallow parameters of conventional names and naming. The glory of the Cross cures underlying terror, fear and fury, although all metaphor falls short of the glory of the mysteries of actual at-onement. Love shows forth what cannot be said, inspiring prophecy that gently indicates what is meant. What fear-driven thought cannot grasp, prayer makes its own when the Spirit unveils wisdom to glory. Wisdom and glory are uncreated energies of illumining compassion, communicating mysteries of incomprehensible love, assimilating in the hallowed Name the glory of love’s Kingdom come.
Love’s hidden mysteries of glorification are always already present before illumination, waiting to be loved and known. Fear refuses to acknowledge this and terror totally rejects this but love remembers it by recapitulating its glory anew as God’s coming presence of glory, love’s glory searched out by wisdom. Glory to come comes when the Kingdom of love’s presence comes, but when fear pushes presence away, resisting glorification, confusion reigns and divisions set in. But love’s mysteries of glorification were always the Father’s hidden secret, concealed with Christ in God from before the foundation of the world. When the Spirit discerns the glory of love’s hidden mystery, it is wisdom that turns and sees, sharing her discernments with all who are beginning to awaken to love’s God-centred glorification of God. So although glorification remains hidden to fear, shut out by terror, it’s mysteries are revealed to love. Presence is cut off from awareness only as long as fear imposes its dictatorship of confusion and division, concealing unconscious subservience to terror and violence.
In conventional religious circles, the Name is in effect re-veiled by fear so that nobody is permitted to awaken to wisdom and nobody is allowed to be hallowed by glory. But Hesychast wisdom dares to remember that the meaning of being has always been unselfish, long-suffering love, transmitting the Name as God-centred love in the desert. Wisdom lovingly awakens the eye of the heart, nurturing illumination so that elders help sustain glorification in the saints. But glorification is not in the gift of elders or saints but is the gift of love’s uncreated grace which the Father pours out through the Son, in the Spirit. A prophetic word may pierce a hardened heart, but it is the Spirit that regenerates the heart with love’s uncreated grace. Prayer of the Name of Jesus may help the mind descend into the heart, but it is the Spirit that awakens the heart to Christ in the midst, restoring hallowing glory to the Father. Unceasing prayer of the Spirit in the heart is wisdom’s delight and glory’s joy, because their unveiling of the Name is the Spirit’s revelation of the timeless grace of uncreated light, revelation of love’s Kingdom, love’s age to come.
Love’s illumined stillness of wisdom in the desert whispers, ‘turn and see,’ opening mysteries of grace by ‘reminding’ the fallen mind through deep turning into the mind of Christ and renewing the heart with deep seeing through Christ, in the Kingdom of the Spirit. Glorification arises within the radiance of uncreated grace as wisdom’s insight into the glory of the hallowing Name, awareness awakening presence and presence enlightening awareness through God’s saving ‘I AM,’ God remembering God in God. It is the wisdom and glory of Holy Trinity that reveals the meaning of being to be unselfish love, sustaining illumination by unveiling God-centred glorification of God in God’s deifying love. Love’s God-centred glorification of God was always the Father’s hidden intention, communicated through his generation of the Son, but without the Spirit’s revelation of uncreated grace, his secret would not be recognised to be an Eternal Gospel of boundless love, whose scope is to save all.
The Son’s generation by the Father and the Spirit’s procession from the Father both reveal love to be the meaning of being, awakening wonder to love’s miracle of being, the wonder that there is anything at all and not nothing. But revelation of the Name ‘I AM’ awakens a further, even more mysterious wonder, wonder that ‘I AM is I AM,’ that ‘HE IS who HE IS,’ always invisibly aware and ever-present everywhere, love’s revelation of ‘I AM’ upstream from creation, from being, from all that there is. The two wonders are connected by love but are distinct, because whilst created wonder reveals love that does not take creation for granted, uncreated wonder reveals love that does not take God’s revelation of God in his Name ‘I AM’ for granted. Both wonders acknowledge uncreated grace and both are an expression of love’s embrace of wisdom and glory. Wisdom first awakens to the wonder of being, that there is anything at all, not nothing, and then turns upstream to the wonder of ‘I AM,’ beyond being, wonder that ‘I AM is I AM,’ that ‘I AM generates I AM,’ that ‘I AM proceeds from I AM.’ Only divine wisdom discerns God’s awestruck wonder that ‘I AM is I AM,’ wonder that divine awareness is ever-present, wonder that divine presence is ever-aware. Only wisdom knows God’s ineffable wonder that his glory is love’s presence, that wisdom is love’s awareness, underlying all that is not yet and all that is no more, as well as all that there is, timeless presence of timeless awareness. Love is the hidden meaning of being but also the enduring meaning of the Name, opening wisdom to wonder at the heart of glorification. It is the wisdom of the Cross of glory that in the hour of glorification reveals unselfish love, grounding prophecy and prayer in the Spirit’s unceasing Pentecost of glorification.