A compassionate Helder suggests,

Passerby,
“First… stop. You cannot get there from here. You are on a path that is an evolutionary dead end, and it is hurting you. Go back to the beginning and take the pleasant path. What you seek is within you already, and as Rumi wrote, “What you seek is seeking you.” As Jesus explained to Nicodemus (John 3), You are a long way down a painful path that demands everything and leads nowhere. You will need to start over; it will feel like being born again (John 3.).

Now, rest. You are exhausted. Mother knows where you are, and as Rabbi Jesus said, “Seek, and you will find (Luke 11:9).” If you feel lost, it is not because She doesn’t know where you are, but because you don’t. You walked a long way from Her, but home is not as far as you imagine, and it will not take as long to return as it took to be where you didn’t want to be. She is behind you, at home. As embarrassing as it may be, She never left you, though you may have wished for it.”

• • •

To Know Her

“If you believe you understand God, I can tell you that what you believe you know is not God.” —Augustine of Hippo.

Helder continues,

“At the beginning of my conscious spiritual journey 55 years ago, now, I believed that my purpose in life was to be a student of god (Yes, god, small g. While the Spirit is compassionate in the face of our ignorance, the god that I was directed to was not the Father of Jesus). As a student, each new understanding was another drop in the bucket, so that, by inference, when the bucket was full of drops, my understanding would be full of the knowledge of god. Still, sadly, I now realize every drop was impure, flawed by the absence of Wonder, for one thing (I suggest you read Abraham Joshua Heschel; I asked for Wonder.) and Awe, but primarily flawed by the absence of a relationship with Her. As a student interested in a comprehensive understanding based on the belief that knowing god is the equivalent of pleasing god, every drop of the knowledge of god produces a certain familiarity not conducive to either the Spirit’s reality or my progress as Her lover. Awe is accepting the truth that no one can completely know Elohim.

Pass, it would be good if you became familiar with “The Cloud of Unknowing,” a delightful spiritual treasure.

Eventually, I grew, and my understanding, gained by my experience of Her, I came to see more fully. Then, rather than Spirit as a quantifiable resource, like a bucket full of water made up of many drops of knowledge, into which I could dip at will, I understand my relationship with Her more akin to floating on an inner tube in the middle of the Spirit’s vast ocean. Floating on that vast ocean, I knew there was no way I could ever be wet with every drop of that sea. Still, I could rest in that I might always be wet all over, with the knowledge of the Spirit. Closer to the truth, but still flawed.

“And now?” asks Passerby.

I no longer believe that the knowledge of Her is, or ever was, the goal of Elohim, the universal Creator Spirit, the lover of my true self, as opposed to my false self through which I had thought to know Her. While knowledge of a beloved is necessary for any loving relationship, it is only a step. Knowing is not loving, and believing in what you believe you know is no substitute for the intimacy for which She created the human-kind.

C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity,

“[She] made us: invented us as a [person] invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline and would not run properly on anything else. Now [She] designed the human machine to run on Himself [sic]. [She Herself] is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other.”

• • •

Created for Her Presence

Now, I see myself as a Passerby, like you, on a journey of cosmic proportions, drawn toward a locus whose location I am not entirely clear about. While unsure how to get there, I trust I will because I trust Her, the essence of faith. I no longer seek to understand god but to experience Her. These days, I am more comfortable with a different metaphor, which I glean from the garden narrative of the Hebrews in the first three chapters of Genesis. It begins for me with an obvious and simple truth. Walking with Her creatures, the human-kind, in the garden, in the cool of the day wasn’t a one-time event. It was, and remains, Her desire always.

This is the model for the relationship: enjoying one another’s company as lovers, learning to know and trust one another in a mutually pleasing context simply because She desires us. And as we do, we see She is lovely in every way. So, discovering mutual attraction in one another, we have fallen in Love with Her. Elohim created human-kind to live permanently in the beauty of Her presence, as partners, not subjects, Loved and in Love with a shared responsibility to all the work of Her hands, and to dwell with Her always in the garden we share.

• • •

Like a Fish for Water

She created the human-kind for Her presence like She created the fish-kind for water. The fish is in the water, and the water is in the fish. Our pleasure is to be in the Spirit, and it is the Spirit’s good pleasure to be in us. To the fish, water is the source of the abundance of all life, and taken out of the water, cut off from the source of that abundant life, they die.

So it is also for human-kind.”

“Helder, I Love that!”