as to the fresco on the Cathedral wall. The true splendour and heart-searching beauty of the Divine Charity is not seen in those cosmic energies which dazzle and confound us; but in the transcendent power which stoops to an intimate and cherishing love, the grave and steadfast Divine action, sometimes painful and sometimes gentle, on the small unfinished soul. It is an unflickering belief in this, through times of suffering and conflict, apathy and desperation, in a life filled with prosaic duties and often empty of all sense of God, that the Creed demands of all who dare recite it.
We are so busy rushing about, so immersed in what we call practical things, that we seldom pause to realize the mysterious truth of our situation: how little we know that really matters, how completely our modern knowledge leaves the deeps of our existence unexplored. We are inclined to leave all that out. But the Creed will not let us leave the mystery out. Christ never left it out. His teaching has a deep recurrent note of awe, a solemn sense of God and the profound mysteries of God: His abrupt creative entrance into every human life, coming to us, touching us, changing us in every crisis, grief, shock, sacrifice, flashing up on life’s horizon like lightning just when we had settled down on the natural level, and casting over the landscape a light we had never dreamed of before. The whole teaching of Christ hinges on the deep mystery and awful significance of our existence; and God, as the supreme and ever-present factor in every situation, from the tiniest to the most universal. The span of His understanding goes from the lilies of the field to the most terrible movements of history. He takes in all the darkness and anxiety of our situation, whether social or personal; and within and beyond all, He finds the creative action of God, the one Reality, the one Life, working with a steadfast and unalterable love, sometimes by the direct action of circumstance and sometimes secretly within each soul in prayer. And this creative action, so hidden and so penetrating, is the one thing that matters in human life.
Jesus chose, as the most perfect image of that action, the working of yeast in dough. The leavening of meal must have seemed to ancient men a profound mystery, and yet something on which they could always depend. Just so does the supernatural enter our natural life, working in the hiddenness, forcing the new life into every corner and making the dough expand. If the dough were endowed with consciousness, it would not feel very comfortable while the yeast was working. Nor, as a rule, does our human nature feel very comfortable under the transforming action of God: steadily turning one kind of love into another kind of love, desire into charity, clutch into generosity, Eros into Agape. Creation is change, and change is often painful and mysterious to us. Spiritual creation means a series of changes, which at last produce Holiness, God’s aim for men.
“O support me,” says Newman, “as I proceed in this great, awful, happy change, with the grace of Thy unchangeableness. My unchangeableness, here below, is perseverance in changing.” The inner life consists in an enduring of this deep transforming process. The chief object of prayer is to help it on: not merely for our own soul’s sake, but for a reason which lifts the devotional life above all pettiness—because this is part of the great creative action which is lifting up humanity to the supernatural order, turning the flour and water of our common nature into the living Bread of Eternal Life. So, the first movement of our prayer must surely be a self-giving to this total purpose, whatever discipline and suffering it may involve for us.
It is a part of the great virtue of self-abandonment, to acknowledge the plain fact that God knows the recipe He is working from and the result He wants to obtain, and we do not. Some need the flame, and respond to its quick action. Others, like the cracknel, come to perfection by moving at a steady pace through the long dark oven which makes a perfect biscuit from a dab of paste. A generous acceptance of this ceaseless creative process, as the thing that matters most in human life, and a willingness to be transformed in whatever way is wanted and at whatever ‘cost, unselfs the inner life, and makes it from the beginning accessible to the searching and delicate action of God; working in ways of which we know nothing, entering and controlling every action, and using every creature, its efforts, sufferings and sacrifices, for the accomplishment of His hidden design.
In Paul Claudel’s great play, “The Satin Slipper,” the whole of the action is made to depend on the single prayer of a dying missionary, left by pirates on a derelict ship. Bound to a spar as to a Cross, he offers up his death; and so gives it the quality of a creative martyrdom, moves the secret springs of the spiritual world, and sets going a series of events which, after long years, save his brother’s soul. The whole scene—the ship in the empty spaces of the Atlantic, the solitary man dying by inches, with the bodies of his companions piled up at his feet—looks to the world a frightful tragedy, a waste of noble lives. But the martyr himself takes it with great tranquillity, saying, “Doubtless the vintage could not come to pass without some disorder: but everything after a little stir, is gone back again into the great paternal peace.” It is as if he said, “I believe in the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth, whose vision and love penetrate His whole creation; and who deigns to use my small pain in the workshop of charity.” Within this unseen spiritual order—which is, after all, the order into which we pass whenever we really pray—he gives with solemn joy his agony and death; that so his brother, who will never know the price of his salvation, may be brought back to God. Twenty years later, the secret powers which his sacrifice released complete their work; and by many crooked paths and strange places his brother’s soul is brought to the feet of God.
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