Grace and Freedom

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The Kingdom comes when the Name is hallowed, unveiling the freedom of grace.  Grace is complete freedom, releasing the strain and stress of laboured effort, letting go of the struggle to achieve what is always already graciously given.  Faith puts its trust in grace, generating confidence in the unconditionality of God’s blessing rather than in conditioned attempts to earn grace as a reward for deeds well done.  Grace frees because grace is always already radical freedom, unconditionally releasing struggle into infinite blessing.  Grace awakens the heart in uncreated light, hallowing the revelatory Name in uncreated glory.  Habitual struggle cannot bear to hear the blessing of grace, but goes on trying, quite unable to release the notion that we are not good enough for grace.  The revelation of the Name is grace in action as uncreated energy, which is why true Name-hallowing opens to the Kingdom of uncreated grace. The timeless origination of the Son in the heart is revealed when the Father, who is without origin, generates the Son in the midst, so that by grace, we abide as sons of the Father through the grace of the Spirit.  Confusion misconstrues communion when it falls short of the glory of grace, plunging the grace of union into division.  To trust conditioned ways and means instead of unconditioned grace is to presume that the reception of grace is impossible because the unworthy are by definition unworthy of grace.

The liberating freedom of grace is therefore unacceptable to those who cling to conditioned ways and means, for whom grace is reward for deeds well done.  But it does not follow that grace is inherently unintelligible or that blessing is irredeemably incoherent, because it does not follow that the unconditioned is not unconditionally free to dispel confusion and heal division.  Grace is timeless liberation, releasing obsession with past and future into timeless presence.  The Eternal Gospel is simply the good news of timeless grace, whereas the temporal gospel is how this same gospel appears within a prevailing obsession with past and future.  Grace is then either past blessing or future glory, never present, never charged with the uncreated presence of God.  Temporal inversions are reversed, however, by the timeless presence of the glory of grace.  To experience glorification is to awaken to the timeless glory of grace, curing the hesitant comings and goings of temporary illumination by purifying timeless glory of temporal falls from grace.  Glorification is not a temporal achievement acquired by conditioned ways and means, but a recognition of what is timelessly the case, since God is always God and grace is always grace.  Falls from glory do not hinder God being God, although they do appear to obscure God to us when we are deluded by them.

Freedom, then, is not a state of grace which hesitantly comes and goes, although that is how it appears in time.  Grace is boundlessly free in its revelation of boundless freedom in the Name. The two-edged sword of revelation cuts through delusion, so that timeless freedom is unveiled.  The grace of union is never a temporal achievement, because it is never subject to temporal confusion or spatial division.  All temporal and spatial frames of reference are just forms of language, not real forms of life, since the timeless graciously and freely gives form to life in every moment.  ‘Worldly’ life is not real life, because it excludes unconditioned grace and timeless freedom.  Grace embraces awareness as wisdom, together with presence as glory, in the timeless presence of God in his Kingdom.  Grace deconstructs all preconceptions leading to freedom closed in by bondage, or to bondage opposed to freedom.  The glory of grace transcends all rational proof or refutation.  Since grace is complete freedom, there is nothing to fear, since grace is glorious in its awesome unconditionality.  So whatever is arising, ‘Amen’ says ‘Yes’ to what is happening, ‘So be it,’ to what is so.  There is nothing to worry about when extraordinary grace is the ordinary way of things.  Nothing is fixed once ‘Amen’ frees all constructs into the timeless freedom of sheer grace.  The ‘Amen’ of grace to grace encompasses the freedom of glory to unveil glory, the ‘Yes’ of faith to blessing that transfigures life with love.  Grace and freedom embrace, here, where the experience of glorification opens wisdom to glory in the hallowed Name.