Excerpts from

The Light of Christ

By Evelyn Underhill

I

Beholding His Glory is only half our job. In our souls too the mysteries must be brought forth; we are not really Christians till that has been done. 'The Eternal Birth,' says Eckhart, 'must take place in You.' And another mystic says human nature is like a stable inhabited by the ox of passion and the ass of prejudice; animals which take up a lot of room and which I suppose most of us are feeding on the quiet. And it is there between them, pushing them out, that Christ must be born and in their very manger He must be laid and they will be the first to fall on their knees before Him. Sometimes Christians seem far nearer to those animals than to Christ in His simple poverty, self-abandoned to God.

The birth of Christ in our souls is for a purpose beyond ourselves: it is because His manifestation in the world must be through us. Every Christian is, as it were, part of the dust-laden air which shall radiate the glowing Epiphany of God, catch and reflect His golden Light. Ye are the light of the world – but only because you are enkindled, made radiant by the One Light of the World. And being kindled, we have got to get on with it, be useful. As Christ said in one of His ironical flashes, 'Do not light a candle in order to stick it under the bed!' Some people make a virtue of religious skulking.

II

The new life grows in secret. Nothing very startling happens. We see the Child in the carpenter’s workshop. He does not go outside the frontiers within which He appeared. It did quite well for Him and will do quite well for us. There is no need for peculiar conditions in the spiritual life. Our environment itself, our home and job, are part of the moulding action of God. Have we fully realized all that is unfolded in this? How unchristian it is to try to get out of our frame, to separate our daily life from our prayer? That third-rate little village in the hills with its limited social contacts and monotonous manual work reproves us, when we begin to fuss about opportunities and scope. And that quality of quietness and ordinariness, that simplicity with which He entered into His great vocation, endured from the beginning to the end. The Child grows as other children, the Lad works as other lads. Total abandonment to the vast Divine Purpose working at its own pace in and through ordinary life and often, to us, in mysterious ways. I love to think that much in Christ's own destiny was mysterious to Him. It was part of His perfect manhood that He shared our human situation in this too. We seem to have in the New Testament a record of certain moments when the clouds parted and He saw for a moment His call and what was at work in Him. 'In that hour He rejoiced ... I thank Thee, Heavenly Father. . . ' It is the same with us. In a general way we too must go steadily on in pure faith and abandonment to God. When even the Divine mind of Christ looks out from His earthly tabernacle, He seldom gets a very clear view, so why should we presume to demand a clear view? We can't break through the Cloud of Unknowing in which our lives are enfolded. Only the Divine Mind which has conceived each one of our hidden destinies can lead us, but secretly. Like Nicodemus, we come to Him by night.

III

We often feel we ought to get on quickly to a new stage like spiritual mayflies. Christ takes thirty years to grow and two and a half to act. The pause, hush, hiddenness which intervene between the Birth and the Ministry are all part of the Divine method. Only the strange dreams Joseph and Mary had, warned a workman and his young wife that they lay in the direct line of God's action, that the growth committed to them mattered supremely to the world. And then, when the growth reached the right stage, there is the revelation of God's call and after it, stress, discipline and choice. ‘By Thy Baptism, Fasting and Temptation, deliver us.' Those things come together as signs of maturity and they are not spectacular things. It is much the same with us in the life of prayer. The Spirit fills us as we grow, develop and make room: He keeps pace with us. He does not suddenly stretch us like a pneumatic tyre with dangerous results. 'To contemplate Christ's life,' said Augustine, 'cures inflation and nourishes humility.' How true that is! We see in Him the gradual action of God. He fosters and sanctifies growth, that secret process, especially growth in the hidden interior life which is the unique sign of His own power and of His power in us.

We get notions sometimes that we ought to spring up quickly like seed on stony ground, we ought to show some startling sign of spiritual growth. But perhaps we are only asked to go on quietly, to be a child, a nice stocky seedling, not shooting up in a hurry, but making root, being docile to the great slow rhythm of life. When you don't see any startling marks of your own religious condition or your usefulness to God, think of the Baby in the stable and the little boy in the streets of Nazareth. The very life was there which was to change the whole history of the human race. There was not much to show for it. But there is entire continuity between the stable and the Easter garden, and the thread that unites them is the Will of God. The childlike simple prayer of Nazareth was the right preparation for the awful privilege of the Cross. Just so the light of the Spirit is to unfold gently and steadily within us, till at last our final stature, all God designed for us, is attained. It is an organic process, a continuous Divine action, not a series of jerks. So on the one hand there should be no strain, impatience, self-willed effort in our prayers and self-discipline; and on the other, no settling down. A great flexibility, a gentle acceptance of what comes to us and a still gentler acceptance of the fact that much of what we see in others is still out of our reach. We must keep our prayer free, frank, youthful – full of confidence and full of initiative too.

IV

The mystics keep telling us that the goal of that prayer and the goal of that hidden life which should itself become more and more of a prayer, is ‘union with God.' We use that phrase often, much too often to preserve the wholesome sense of its awe-fulness. For what does union with God mean? It is not a nice feeling we get in devout moments. That may or may not be a by-product of union – probably not. It can never be its substance. Union with God means every bit of our human nature transfigured in Christ, woven up into His creative life and activity, absorbed into His redeeming purpose, heart, soul, mind and strength. Each time it happens it means that one of God's creatures has achieved its destiny.

And if men and women want to know what this means in terms of human nature, what it costs and what it becomes, there is only one way – contemplation of the life of Christ. Then we see that we grow in wisdom and stature not just for our own sakes -just to become spiritual – but that His teaching, healing, life-giving power may possess us and work through us; that we may lose our own lives and find His life, be conformed to the Pattern shown in Him, conformed to the Cross. Those are the rich and costly demands and experiences that lie before us as we stand at the first window and look at the Child setting up a standard for both simple and learned, teaching the secrets of life; and what they ask from us on our side and from our prayer is a very great simplicity, self-oblivion, dependence and suppleness, a willingness and readiness to respond to life where it finds us and to wait, to grow and change, not according to our preconceived notions and ideas of pace, but according to the overruling Will and Pace of God.