Glory originates and consummates God-centred glory in the timeless completeness of God-centred wisdom. Original glory conceives us, nourishes us and matures us as we progress towards the consummation of glory in the timeless completeness of wisdom. The circular singularity of wisdom is centred on the circular wholeness of God at centre, freeing us from all that breaks the holy circuit of God’s deifying energies, centred as they are on God in the midst. God’s uncreated energies, such as love, wisdom and glory, are innumerable, but they all hallow God’s Name, revealing God at centre in the midst. God’s energies are his deifying activity at work in elders and saints, opening temporal awareness to timeless presence of God at centre. When we fall from glory, God’s timeless presence at centre is veiled, obscuring paradise. Fallenness is unstable because it longs to return to a God-centred, timeless equilibrium. It yearns to return to God-centred awareness, at ease in the joy of God-centred presence. But divisive temporality, separating past and future, pull it off-centre, depriving it of awareness of timeless completeness. The pull of the past lies at the heart of conservatism, whilst the pull of the future lies at the heart of progressivism. Our politics is conditioned by these contrary tendencies, which at times threaten to tear our life in common apart. But timeless completeness holds past and future together in a wholesome present, an all-embracing presence, integrating conservative and progressive tendencies, uniting past-centred origination and future-centred consummation in timeless completeness.
The single eye is God-centred, like the heart itself. That is why it longs to unite with the heart and to live in union with God. When we turn and see, the single eye unites with the heart, restoring God-centred awareness in the God-centred heart. This frees both mind and heart to live in God, through God, for God, which is deification in Holy Trinity. Nothing created usurps God at centre in the midst, liberating love’s glory to embrace creation without addiction to created God-substitutes. This frees the Spirit to become the way and the truth of God-centred life. Centred in God, whose presence is ever-present, the future embraces the past in the present as glory to come unites with original glory at centre, past and future integrated in the timeless presence of wisdom and ever-present glory. This liberates mind and heart from compulsive addictions to past-centred conservatism and future-centred progressivism whilst embracing everything of value in our sacred past or in our God-centred future. Because both the sacred past and the deifying future are present in God’s Name, God’s presence at centre transfigures heart and mind into wholesome God-centredness. When our politics becomes divisive and conservative tendencies declare war on progressive politics, the pull of past and future may threaten to tear us apart, because there is no awareness of unconditioned presence at centre, so nothing to hold past and future together in wholesome, timeless presence.
At such times, when referendums or elections reveal how divided we have become, there is an urgent need for wisdom to hold together warring tendencies in renewing, God-centred ways. The God-centredness of wisdom is not confused by God-centred seers with some sort of autocratic centrism inposed by the state, or by some authoritarian centrist faction, usurping God. True wisdom is anarchic in profoundly sacred ways because it values freedom without descending into divisive individualism. The Spirit of truth is radically liberating without trace of the shallow liberalism that fails to honour all we hold in common. Sacred tradition is neither exclusively conservative nor divisively progressive, because it conserves all that is of value in wholesome ways, without fixation on the past, welcoming progress without addiction to pointless novelty, undermining sacred co-inherence. Wisdom tradition holds steady to God-centred awareness, in union with God’s deifying presence in the midst, without fastening onto anything that usurps God, without driving past and future apart in unhealthy ways. It does so by hallowing God’s Name, revealing God at centre, uniting past and future in timeless presence. It stands steadfast without fixation and holds steady without addiction. This frees up the infinitely spacious centre for the Spirit’s truth which is liberating in anarchic ways, releasing all abusive imposition in ways that honour freedom without shattering co-inherence.
Wisdom is not political in partisan or populist ways but is profoundly wholesome and catalytic in surprising ways, restoring wholesome politics by hallowing freedom in healthy co-inherent ways. Wisdom values what we hold in common without subservience to communist or populist autocracies, opening new kinds of progressive co-operation without tearing healthy co-inherence apart. The spaciousness of integral wisdom liberates without imposing divisive liberalism on a marginalised, impoverished world. So-called liberalism, individualistic to the core, enriches the richest whilst impoverishing the vast majority and oppressing the very poor. At a time when this global liberalism amasses vast wealth for a rich minority but plunges every economy into crisis after crisis, wisdom seeks to restore wholesome freedom together with healthy co-inherence, opening to new kinds of co-operation involving fresh expressions of collaborative freedom. Since wisdom is inherently ineffable, there is a sense in which all wisdom’s initiatives are also inherently ineffable, although we inevitably try to press old language into handling what is ineffably unfolding. Since wisdom is intrinsic openness, fear is bound to react to what appears to threaten its survival, safety and security, causing both conservative and progressive initiatives to degenerate into divisive incoherence. Since wisdom is awakening to unconditioned presence, narcissism inevitably seeks to highjack development by subjecting it to ego-centric and ethnocentric control. Since wisdom is wondrous oneness, nihilism is bound to interfere by subjecting it to irrational relativism, producing a world of fake news and endless, ideological lies.
Wisdom is resisted by paranoia, narcissism, and nihilism, but these deformities are themselves evidence that conditions for a break-through into integral wisdom are already present, but in these cases experienced as a threat, manifesting as reactions that threaten to crush its emergence. The challenge is for wisdom to embrace the reactive negations that counter its active creativity, so everyone may turn and see that collaborative creativity is in everyone’s best interests, fulfilling wholesome freedom in co-operative ways. Whether or not the spaciousness of ineffable openness and timeless oneness is called God, is not, therefore, the decisive issue. Rather, what is crucial is that wisdom’s openness and creativity is widely embraced, enabling what sacred tradition once called ‘God’ to be embraced at centre in ways that heal egocentric narcissism and ethnocentric nihilism. There must be secular as well as religious and spiritual ways to welcome wisdom home into the midst, otherwise the dualisms of modernity and post-modernity will remain unhealed. No ‘Green New Deal’ or wholesome healing of divisive power politics is realistic without a profound change of mind and heart capable of sustaining the transformations that are unfolding. This is wisdom’s holy work at the heart of the religions, of secular spiritualities and of all the atheisms and agnosticisms that sense the call of wisdom.
Wisdom has very ancient roots in the mysteries of primordial origination and the sacred past, but also in the mysteries of eschatological consummation that lie in wisdom’s ineffable future, a future which is already present for wisdom, a future that is already breaking into our temporal structures with its timeless consummation and completeness. So wisdom reminds us there is healing reaching out to us in the present from the ancient past and from the ineffable future, incorporating all that divides us into a wholesome embrace. This is what the ancient wisdom traditions called integral wisdom, a wisdom that is at once very ancient and radically new, because it is always timeless in its wholesome completeness. Traditional seers see as they are seen within the ineffable seeing of this integral wisdom, bringing to contemporary conflicts wisdom’s awareness of the uncreated, creative inversions of all extremist negations. This wisdom is sometimes dialectical, resolving what needs to be resolved and sometimes paradoxical, holding in critical tension what can never be resolved. Timeless wisdom has always held in tension the extremes that arise as a result of our temporal incompleteness whilst releasing extremism into the timeless consummation of ineffable completeness.
Wisdom offers the dignity of difference to wholesome oneness so that unity does not degenerate into unhealthy confusion and difference does not disintegrate into extremist division. This is the ancient language of Christian wisdom, taught it by the mysteries of Christ and Holy Trinity, but every wisdom has its own unique ways of expressing the ineffable. Addressing the divisive dislocations of degenerate extremism, wisdom traditions breathe spacious liberation into the knotted hatreds that tear us apart. This opens to a wondrous creativity that embraces sacred and secular worlds, opening them to common concerns, unconditional concerns that are ultimate for all. This grounds unconditional values in unconditioned awareness, opening conditioned conflicts to unconditioned wholeness, whether or not the unconditioned is given the name God, or simply acknowledged in silence. However expressed, the sacred past of primordial origination is embraced together with the hallowing future of eschatological consummation, grounding conservative and progressive tendencies in timeless openness and unconditioned completeness. However expressed, wisdom breathes spacious openness and wholesome freedom into every impasse, turning degenerate extremism into wholesome difference and divisive demonisation into hallowed co-inherence. This is timeless completeness resonant with the union of wisdom and glory, an ineffable union abiding at centre in every heart, a hallowing communion hidden in the Holiest recess of a timeless Holy of Holies.