Integration

Integration: matter assumed a spiritualised human body. It must consequently abandon its autonomy and hence its most sublime manifestations: storm, fire, sea….

Once in a human body, matter becomes wholly “invisible”. And yet, its beauty is here unsurpassable, by the grace of the descending form.

It was God’s boldest plan to predestine individual spirits as matter for the highest kind of molding. Here too, by becoming a member of the Mystical Body, the spirit in a true sense gives up its highest natural manifestations:

It must in some sense decline in order to enter into unity. But at the same time, through grace, it gains an unsuspected supernatural beauty.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat

Rainbow

It was clear from the start that the work was more brilliant than any other I had encountered and as the story unfolded I drank it in like nectar, the most sublime poem that had ever been written. I tried to commit the piece to memory but so perfect was the arrangement of words that my mind could barely comprehend their beauty, let alone learn them completely. Only one word would I remember, and this stood out as clearly as the others eluded me:

Rainbow

This is the only thing that I remembered for sure from what I read, that an early or integral part of it was of a rainbow, sign of God’s covenant with the Earth. But if the words were veiled, the meaning of the writing was evident at once.

I held in my hands the most heart-breaking love story that had ever been written by one (a male) for the other, at one and the same time human and divine, natural and supernatural. The character of the author was laid bare by the words but the object of his love seemed to have been absent from his existence for an eternity, or no longer present, except as a memory or product of the imagination. A tale of lost or unrequited love.

In this tale I beheld the power of love, as if tears that sprang from a broken heart had fallen from the eyes of the beholder and transformed themselves directly into words on a page. This was a passion so great that I wonder how I even bore witness to the fruit of its longing, beauty and sorrow combined with infinity and sown as a microcosm of nature.

So deep was this love that from the pain had been born the work of creation, which encompassed the whole of nature and found fragile first expression in the rainbow, wherein may be seen the depth of love as a blend of enlightenment and tears.

As I read on, enthralled and governed by the power of these words, they were seamlessly transformed into a pictorial continuation of the scene being described. I was completely taken up with what I saw, which seemed to satisfy every yearning for understanding within myself, even though the complete meaning was beyond my realm of knowledge.

I found myself in the outer limit of deep space, truly the middle of nowhere, suspended by the unseen force that was author of the magical words I had just been reading. Below me I saw planets, but mostly was aware of simply the infinitude of space – the infinity he had to cross in order to reach her. Where had she gone and why – was she lost, had she run, did she die – what terrible catastrophe had befallen them to rend asunder the love that created the universe.

The whole of this space was the filled with the hymn of God to his lost love and my gaze was fixed on this impossible expanse of nothing, the overwhelming sorrow that was wholly without end; how I arrived there I shall never know.

When I became conscious of his mission – his determination against all odds to find her – the scene at once changed and I found my self upon the ground, but not within my room. I saw green fields appearing in front of me as if I were standing at the edge of a botanic kingdom. At the centre of this world was the largest and most wonderful tree I had ever seen. Could this have been the tree of life, I wondered, or the tree of knowledge of good and evil, perhaps?

The White Age

Come back now

Thank goodness that was over – a second more and I would definitely have started panicking – I wasn’t at my best underwater, but so often seemed to find myself in that position whenever I became conscious of my situation.

Why, I asked myself, did ‘holidays’ almost invariably end with being captured by the sea? The only time I had really experienced a watery destination and had managed to avoid going under was when I had gone to the prior existence of the light side with Peter, a place of virtual hieroglyphic communication, very close to the ancient Sanskrit lands. How I would love to recall that tale, for it was truly the epic journey of my most sublime imagination, an Arabian night made day.

There, the water had been azure, the vista of magical blue eternity studded with islands of far-reaching heart-felt wishes. A breathtaking view indeed and if I should ever recall or revisit that fathomless beach of my Odyssey, surely I would declare unto it the homage of a thousand sighs in words, without weeping.

This was the fantasy of the East as it was in the eye of the creator, reflection in light of the land near and far, mystical pre-incarnation of a maharaja’s dream. Never before seen were those crystal quartets of jewel-like structures, the bathing houses of ideal dimension, gleaming quadratics, defined manifestations of the glittering perception of marble queens. This was no ordinary era, it was the utmost peak of infinity. It was the white age.

There were reams of turquoise, ether avenues of ultraviolet stone, columns of mystique, the foundations of purity in a destination almost unseen, all at the origin of eternity’s horizon, whilst onward stretched the shore of our forever on the smoothest sea of love….

It’s at this point that my memory fails, though in my minds eye I still see the crystal waters, which none can remove from my understanding of mysteries, far beyond the green of the Zoroastrian glade.

Not too far back