I have chosen to go the wrong way. I have accidentally scarred my soul when I meant to find happiness. I have confused desire with love and short term pain relief with healing.
I had to learn that the cancer of my lack of love could not be healed with momentarily forgetting the pain of my aloneness.
I was in a spiritual desert trying to build a kingdom of self. Sand castles. Victories with play swords. It was always futile, but if I gave up the dream there would be nothing.
Fear consumed me in that desert place. This fear was twofold: that if I gave up on sin, that I was giving up on the only happiness I had ever known and that I was too loathsome for a universe with a God good enough to forgive me.
Why not just annihilate my miserable self and put my little stretch of the cosmos out of its misery?
Like many people I have known, the mere thought of a God so good and loving that He could have mercy on me made me afraid. Such fierce compassion! Such severe mercy would leave me for all eternity exposed as one so foolish, so unworthy, so hateful as to require the ultimate sacrifice.
I did not want to be a welfare recipient for all eternity. It was pride, but pride which did not want to be the flaw in perfection, the tolerated off-key singer in the angelic choir ruining the song in the conductors benevolence.
Healing at such price was too terrible, better the sweet oblivion of meaningless death.
But I could not believe in oblivion. It was too simple for the facts and anything short of oblivion meant that I needed mercy. Some suggest that nature is enough to inspire reverence and awe, but for me it was both not enough and too much.
It was not enough, because it was not quite as beautiful as the longing it awakened in me for something better. It was too much because it was so beautiful that it kept triggering that vision.
Then I realized what I should have known through Sunday School. The fierce perfection of Heaven was Love and not just the straight edge of a ruler. God was locked in compassionate cycle of healing and reconciliation in which no note would be allowed to remain sour.
He would not just “fix me,” but in a greater miracle reconcile all my history to Himself. Indeed, He would do this and make all well (and more than well!) whether I cooperated or not, but there was a chance to bow before this Divine rearrangement and enjoy it.
I was divine charity case, but He also wanted to make me His son and heir. It would be as if my folly had been my wisdom. The glory of the Cross would be to bring good from my evil.
In his poem Taliessin Through Logres Charles Williams writes of a penitent woman who has received undeserved grace:
Aching, stiff, she rose, stumbled, fell;
the king’s poet caught her. ‘So are the guilty taught,
sweet friend, who sit in the pass of the Perilous Sell.’
She said, ‘I was wrong from beginning—-’ ‘Not to an end.
O new Pheilippides, that stumble was Marathon won.
Remains but the triumph’s race to run.’
The ‘Perilous Sell’ is the seat at the Round Table reserved for the one worthy of the vision of the Holy Grail. It is perilous, because sitting in it when unworthy brings death. What knight would risk such a thing?
But of course many of us have risked it. We have dreamed of being Galahad when we are merely Sir Key. Worst still, we have stupidly believed one can be Lancelot and still see the Grail.
Like the women in William’s poem, I had to see I was wrong from the very beginning. Even my virtue led to vice. My pride to abasement. My loves to hurt.
The answer of the King’s bard to the penitent is God’s answer to me.
I like so many others thought self-rule would bring happiness.
We have paid with spiritual death. We tramped off on our great romantic adventure only to have it turn to our judgment.
The painful good news is that I could not really defy Heaven even in that. My folly became the means for Heaven’s wisdom!
The guilty woman had to hear that her very stumble had become a glorious victory. What next? Do we merely sit with head lowered in shame?
What comes after Mercy sets us free?
The poet Taliessin compares what remains for this penitent woman to the work of legendary Pheilippides.
This brave soldier brought the news of victory to Athens from the battle of Marathon. Pheilippides (the spelling varies) ran to Athens with the good news so the citizens would not burn the city (the first marathon!) and died as he spoke the word of victory.
All that is left for the forgiven woman (and for me!) is to run the rest of life in the glorious marathon announcing Heaven’s victory. Every step rings with the defeat of the ancient foe! All is well! Triumph! Victory!
God had mercy on me and all that was left was to love and run towards him.
My desert was made the victorious battlefield of His Triumph. I am rushing to my home with great news! My death will be a glorious end to that race with eternity to follow. Victory!
If alive, then it is not too late for you to share this great hope.
You still have a chance of living under the Mercy. Everything and everyone will be reconciled to Christ, but you can do so now.
The great fact is the Lordship of Jesus. It is a fact so obvious that in the end not even Satan will be able to deny it. We will all be placed in the Seat of Peril, see the Lord of the Grail, and find in that vision life or death.
You are racing toward His Lordship, but not in a way that you will find pleasant. Turn around. At that moment of turning, while still guilty, He will be victorious in you. You will see Him to life and not death and you will have only triumph’s race to run.
There is still time to live under the Mercy.
