Like poetic prophecy, the Song of Songs is lyrical wisdom poetry and like Hosea’s prophetic poetics of love, the Song offers us a wisdom poetry of love that employs lyrical love tropes to transfigure love. Poetic prophecy communicates wisdom mysteries of love’s ineffable glory, opening the human heart into transfiguring glory in the very heart of God. Mystical theology can… Read more »
The witness of the desert is heard in timeless stillness, HESYCHIA, giving Hesychast wisdom a timeless quality. The stages of the growth of spiritual maturation and restoration: purification, illumination and glorification, do appear to manifest in different tenses, purification anticipating illumination, glorification referring back to illumination and illumination to purification, but the sequential drama is more like a temporal play in… Read more »
Chalcedonian Christian wisdom lives and abides within Christ’s own unconfused indivisibility, the unconfused indivisibility of his divine-humanity, the unconfused indivisibility of his union with the Father as the Son, the unconfused indivisibility of the Spirit’s witness to the unconfused union and indivisible communion of the Father and the Son. This is the ineffable wisdom of the Song of Songs, the… Read more »
Christ embraces his Beloved in stillness, wedding his Beloved Bride, the Church, whose apostles testify to his resurrection, whose prophets unveil the Name and whose saints bear witness to glory in God’s God-centred glorification of God. Christ in our midst sings his Song of Songs that glorifies his Beloved in our midst. Desert wisdom is not a loveless exclusion but a passionate… Read more »
Saint Symeon the New Theologian profoundly influenced desert Hesychasm, bearing witness in the Spirit to uncreated light of glory in the midst, wisdom revealing Holy Trinity in uncreated light. Uncreated wisdom and uncreated glory unite in uncreated light. Uncreated awareness of uncreated presence is uncreated light. In the glory of grace, pure awareness unites with pure presence, transfiguring everything in ineffable,… Read more »
Desert wisdom transmits transfiguring light in the Name, inspiring glorification of God in God through the Name, turning seers of glory into friends of transfiguration. Prophecy hands on the uncreated Word that reveals the Name which pure prayer is empowered to assimilate, embraced as revelation of glory in the awakened heart. Friends of transfiguration live in the light of glory, the… Read more »
In chapter 45 of his Life of St David, (c 1081-1095), Rhygyfarch tells us that St David visited the Patriarch of Jerusalem with St Teilo and St Padarn. St David returned with a portable altar, a bell, a staff and a coat, gifts which according to Rhygyfarch worked great miracles. The historical veracity of this tradition has often been contested but its… Read more »
God the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father to abide in the Son, so the union of the Father and the Son, which is the mystery of the Holy Name, is opened to us in God. It is not something we observe from without; it is revealed through God, in God, from within. Orthodox tradition sees the Patriarch Enoch as… Read more »
Glory throws symbols like rainbow bridges between the uncreated and the created, symbols like light and fire, symbols which wisdom beholds as uncreated, creative energies unifying unity and difference in ways that confusion and division conceal. Uncreated energies wed creation in holy unions of hallowing unity and wholesome difference, a holy love-play between wisdom and glory that sees awareness as… Read more »
The wisdom transmission of Yah Shuah Mari Yah is the mystical legacy of Yeshuah, the Beloved, through MariYah, his Beloved Disciple, deliberately hidden at the heart of the Fourth Gospel, the three Epistles of Saint John and the Book of Revelation. The Gospel of Philip remembered their holy co-companionship to be the concealed key to what MariYah, Apostle to the Apostles,… Read more »