The Revelation of the Name hallows the ground where the bush burns, glorifying all who turn to see, unveiling the Name that consumes confusion whilst abiding in the Name that does not consume (Ex 3:1-14). Christ’s wisdom opens heavens on earth when the Name is hallowed on earth as in heaven, which is why the Lord’s Prayer hallows the Name, that the Kingdom may come in glory, hallowing the ground. Glorification communicates an ineffable hallowing that saints undergo, including great tribulation until resistance is finally overcome by grace with the uncreated energies of costly love, purifying the heart in love’s life-blood of the slaughtered lamb. Revelation of the Name is hallowing glorification that undergoes ordeals of purifying love and trials by fire which enlighten and deify the heart.
In these times of trial, glory is experienced sometimes as purifying fire and at other times as enlightening love, but glorification in time is never finished, although wisdom bears unbroken witness to the timeless completeness of Christ’s deifying glory, completeness communicating eternal mysteries of union and communion. When seers ascend, addictive fixations are gradually released, but Christ’s glory, his Bride, descends to heal all that ascension was not yet able to cure. Glory is God’s, not ours, so God-centred glorification is a divine mystery, not something we do whilst leaving all our self-centred delusions intact. The Name puts self-obsession and self-delusion to death with the saving cross of radical self-emptying, in accordance with the eternal sacrifice of the slaughtered lamb that has been ending delusion from the very beginning. Our co-operation is our ‘yes’ to God’s own Amen to the lamb in us, his primordial gift of faith and graced trust in the saving Name’s timeless capacity to dissolve confusion and to heal division, hallowing the ground of the heart.
Revelation of the Name begins at the end with wisdom’s vision of the completeness of Christ glorified, in whom all resistance is overcome, restoring in the end the original glory of the beginning, but opening it as deifying presence way beyond all that has ever been. The glory of God’s Kingdom comes when wisdom welcomes the ineffable glory of the age to come, hallowing the ground of the heart. God’s ever-present awareness embraces his all-embracing presence, wisdom conjoined with glory in the hallowed Name. But self-interested resistance fiercely preserves self-centred confusion from all interference from God-centred glorification, imposing a plethora of conditioning addictions to preserve self-centred power and self-satisfying control. These addictive fixations always crucify wisdom, meaning that glorification is always martyred, or driven into exile, over and over again. The Book of Revelation reveals how the Name overcomes these demonic resistances in a series of critical conflicts, followed by moments of blessing with graced union and in turn by further conflicts, eventually resolved as graced communion rises into love’s ineffable light of glory.
The life-story of the Name has always involved something like this relentless drama of unfolding revelation, hostile resistance and inexplicable communion, manifesting as a dramatic history of inspired vision, demonic denial and radiant glory, a story of hallowing holiness that is told, retold and relived in every age. When the Name consumes confusion, the ground is holy where the bush burns, but delusion-consuming glory preserves the bush, transfigured but unconsumed. Diabolical division is consumed, preserving the difference between the uncreated and the created, just as satanic confusion is consumed, preserving union. These christophanic mysteries of ascent and descent lie at the heart of every theophany of the revealed Name. They preserve the wisdom which inspires Holy Orthodoxy in every age. They are the lived experience of Christ’s mysteries of Baptism or purification, Chrismation or illumination and Communion or glorification that reveal the wisdom of Holy Orthodoxy, nourishing elders and saints, as in turn they preserve angelic wisdom functions on earth as they sustain angelic communion in heaven.
Revelation of the Name underlies living prophecy and prayer, which bear costly witness to the Name’s power to overcome self-interested power systems, together with every self-serving, self-centred delusion, not by force of arms but through the power of love, not with violence but with the ineffable wisdom of the slaughtered lamb. Resurrection is, indeed, a glorious victory but it is the victory of the cross as well as the glory of resurrection, not that of bruit force. It is empowered by divine forgiveness and merciful compassion, not by dictatorial abuse or ruthless control. The Name reveals the wisdom of glory, which is the wisdom of unselfish love, the beauty of holiness in the sanctuary of the heart. Witness to resurrection certainly involves white as well as red martyrdom but there is no trace of a victimised martyr complex in glorification, because Christ’s humility is free of self-regard.
Grace is trial by fire but it purifies the heart, illumines the mind and hallows the ground where the bush burns. The Name embraces the whole of mankind, for whom the Spirit intercedes, in hallowing communion with the Son. The Name extinguishes confusion and annihilates division but sustains union whilst preserving uncreated difference from divisive dissipation. Prophecy transmits the Name that prayer assimilates in the Spirit as glory loved and known. Seas of raging confusion are calmed to become expansive translucence, transmuting divisive energies into transfiguring glory. Revelation of the Name is wisdom’s hidden witness, unveiling grace in Christ as ineffable joy and glory as incomprehensible peace, opening oneness of awareness in God to communion of presence in the saints. Elders transmit the Name as fire purifying confusion, light extinguishing division and glory communicating deifying completeness, gathering the saints into God’s timeless Sabbath rest, hallowing the ground where the bush burns in every generation, communicating ‘I AM.’