"it it not at least possible that along some one line of his multi-dimensional eternity, he sees you forever in the nursery pulling wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a school boy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? it may be that salvation consists not in the canceling of those eternal moments, but in the perfect humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to god's compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. perhaps in that eternal moment st. peter- he will forgive me if i am wrong- forever denies his master.
an ordinary simple christian kneels down to say his prayers. he is trying to get into touch with god. but if he is a christian, he knows what is prompting him to pray is also god: god, so to speak, inside him. but he also knows that all his real knowledge of god comes through christ, the man who was god- that christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. you see what is happening. god is the thing to which he is praying- the god he is trying to reach. god is also the thing inside him- the motive power. god is also the road or the bridge aong which he is being pushed to that goal. so that the whole three-fold life of the three-personal being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. the man is being caught up into higher kinds of life- zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into god, by god, while still remaining himself... he is beginning, so to speak, to inject his kind of life and thought, his zoe, into you, beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. the part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin... the question is not what we intended ourselves to be but what he intended us to be when he made us. he is the inventor, we are only the machine. he is the painter, we are only the picture. how should we know what he means us to be like? inside our mother's bodies, we were once rathe rlike vegetables and once like fish; it was only later that we resembled human babies. if we had been conscious, we would have been quite contented to remain as vegetables or fish. but all the time, he knew his plan for us and was determined to carry it out. something the same is now happening at a higher level... there is so much of him that millions and millions of little christs, all different, are still too few to express him fully. he made them all, all the different men that you and i were intended to be. in that sense, our real selves are all waiting for us in him. it is no good trying to be myself without him. the more i resist him to live on my own, the more i am dominated by my heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. 'myself' is the meeting place of trains of events i never started and cannot stop. when i give myself up to his personality, i begin to have a personality of my own... it is the other way around; my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why i love myself. that is how we love our enemies. that is how he loves us. not for any nice attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are those things called selves. he knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you near perfection, but the goal toward which he is guiding you is absolute perfection and no power in the universe, except you yourself, can prevent him from taking you there... and yet this helper, who will be satisfied with nothing less than perfection will be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty... we have not got to try to climb up into the spiritual life by our own effort. it has already come down into the human race in one man. one of our race has this new life: a good infection. if we get close enough to him... we shall catch it from him. those divine demands which to our ears sound like those of a despot, not a lover, marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. he demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. do we suppose they can do hi any good or fear? a man can no more diminish god's glory by refusing to worship him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling darkness on his cell walls, but god wants our good and our only good is to love him and to love him we must know him and if we know him, we shall fall flat on our faces. if we do not, what we are trying to love is not yet god- though it may be the nearest approximation to god which our thought and fantasy can attain... god is the one without whom nothing is strong... he wrote us, like characters in a novel."
