The Reign of God is uncontrived within every person, wondrously present and aware, awakening wisdom to glory in God’s presence, opening to pure stillness through self-emptying. Healing stillness is in harmony with the uncreated light of wisdom, so gives rise to the union of the mind and the heart in the Name. The Holy Spirit nurtures this union by imparting direct spiritual communion to those who turn and see, sustaining wisdom in uncreated glory. Fallen distraction tries to unseat wisdom in the heart by dissipating it, but the Holy Spirit communicates wisdom that never ceases to pray in Christ for fallen sinners, restoring them to grace. The conditioned mind sleeps when the unconditioned heart is awake, beholding God’s presence in uncreated light. The reign of God severs conventional conditioning as it abides unconditionally in unconditioned grace.
The spiritually blind have this treasure within them but fail to see it, falling into the ditch of oblivion, forgetting the remembrance of God. Awakened seers are in awe of God’s reign within them, full of wonder that the heart is awake, delighting in the joy of the hallowed Name. Saint Sophrony the Hesychast pointed directly to the mystery of awakened personhood, preferring kindly laughter to laboured thinking that froze afflictions in ways that breed endless troubles. Metanoia turns awareness right round, awakening theoria, ‘seeing’ that sees with the eye of the Spirit, revealing the Name. Saint Sophrony restored hearts to stillness, holy hesychia, because for him, spiritual awareness of resurrection , overcoming death by death, unveiled the person and took precedence over clever thinking, enabling him to restore Orthodox Christian Hesychasm to its true foundations, the unconditioned reign of God in awakened hearts.
Profound faith trusts the reign of God to communicate its glorious Gospel of true personhood, liberating Christians from narrowing evangelical obsessions. True faith sees with the eye of the heart, transcending endless thinking. The reign of uncreated grace lives from uncreated light, not sophisticated opinion, unveiling the original face of graced personhood. Grace frees the Name to reveal God, way beyond preoccupation with conditioning ways and means, empowering the Gospel to communicate grace. The spiritually blind find grace obstruce, because they love many words but neglect their meaning, preferring their opinion to the ineffable words of God. The reign of God is always perfectly complete, genuinely mysterious but never mystifying, well able to complete our temporal incompleteness with God’s timeless completeness.