Sublime

To acknowledge that we have absolute need of the mediator, Jesus, means a practical acceptance of the fact that, to attain to God, we must die with Jesus: not of ourselves, or by ourselves, but `in him'. I must enter into his death. This death is a death to my self-centredness and self-possession. It is an ecstasy: a going right out of myself to be

Of course the mysticism of suffering can easily be perverted into a justification of suffering itself. The mysticism of the cross can of course praise submission to fate as a virtue and be perverted into melancholy apathy. To suffer with the crucified Christ can also lead to self-pity. But faith is then dissociated from the suffering Christ, seeing

In his notes on the theology of Jakob Böhme, Dr. Franz Hartmann thus sums up the mystic symbolism of the crucifixion: “The cross represents terrestrial life, and the crown of thorns the sufferings of the soul within the elementary body, but also the victory of the spirit over the elements of darkness. The body is naked, to indicate that the candida

For if you cast away all sorrow, you of course retain only whatever joy you have. Yet this will avail but little. Learn, therefore, from the lily and the bird. Cast all your sorrow upon God, entirely, unconditionally, as the lily and the bird do: then you will become unconditionally joyful like the lily and the bird.

For he was very miserable. Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life – the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it – can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word.