The Word Becomes Flesh: Meditations on John 1-5

By Adrienne von Speyr

The first of von Speyr's scriptural commentaries, focusing on her reflections on the first five chapters of John and the beginning of the public life of Our Lord. She shares moving meditations on such profound and dramatic scenes as the witness of John the Baptist, the call of the disciples, the wedding at Cana, the cleansing of the money-changers in the temple, the Samaritan woman, etc. The combination of the Scripture verses and her meditations provide rich nourishment for prayer and spiritual reading. This series is particularly important because the spirituality of St. John, the Apostle of Divine Love, was the central source of von Speyr's own inspiration and spiritual life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781681492803

Adrienne von Speyr

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) was a Swiss medical doctor, a convert to Catholicism, a mystic, and an author of more than sixty books on spirituality and theology. She collaborated closely with theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, her confessor for twenty-seven years, and together they founded the Community of Saint John. Among her most important works are Handmaid of the Lord, Man before God, Confession, and her commentaries on the Gospel of Saint John.

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INTRODUCTION

The characteristic quality of the Apostle John is most clearly seen where the natural and supernatural have become united in him and keep breaking forth from this unity to form it anew, interpret it, and allow other believers to participate in it in a way that calls into service all that is natural and supernatural in them. John is the disciple whom the Lord loves, with a supernatural, Christian and divine love, but equally a really human love. John experiences the Son of God as his Lord and friend, and all that is human and belongs to friendship in the Lord opens for John perspectives of the supernatural, the divine, of the love of the Son for the Father, of the triune God. The Lord as well as John use this human love to throw light on divine love, to explain how the Father loved men when he created them, how he loves them when he sends the Son, to such a degree that he teaches them to love through his own love.

The Lord is friend to John and also God. John recognizes the divine in the friend, and the friend in the divine. The Lord uses this friendship to open John in all directions and give him the deepest insight into the love of God a man has ever received. But since this insight can constantly flow from friendship, there is no danger that it may at any moment become merely intellectual, exaggerated or strange. It keeps its naturalness even in the most sublime raptures, something of the naturalness Adam possessed before the fall in his relationship with God. An unerring sureness about what God desires and what he avoids, an enablement to grow ever deeper into his will and his love. A wholeness that allows the disciple to experience the most supernatural things in the most natural way, to feel always perfectly at home in the place that is his in the Lord’s love, and from there to do out of love all that love shows and reveals to him,

John is something like a son to the Lord. He obeys him as a son obeys his Father, he allows himself to be instructed, he knows no greater joy than to be with his Father and to show him his love, and it comes equally natural to him to receive the Father’s love. John experiences this love as a gift of grace that contains in itself the demand for his whole life. He follows; he will stand beneath the Cross; he will outlive the Lord and experience the vision of Revelation. But he is not concerned with the borderline between the joy of this love and its strict demand, because he has given all his love forever to the Lord and because he knows that the Lord’s answer, whatever it may be, will always and at every cost be an answer of love—even if it should lead him into landscapes that hardly appear human. The bracket of love is forever closed around these two; the most extreme, the darkest, and most incomprehensible that could happen will always take place within this bracket. John is like a son to the Lord in this: in his boundless trust and in that the questions he asks him have no need to touch on this essential reality, which is always already his from the Lord, who keeps him in it.

When God the Father gave Eve to Adam, he gave him a companion, a helpmate in love, a kind of second self. John can never be the alter ego of the Lord because he is not God, but he is in a certain sense a companion, a helpmate to the Lord, a partner, his ear, something like the translation of his thoughts. In his love for the disciple the Lord can always try out how far a man can meet, understand, assimilate the divine in the incarnate Son, how far he can use it in order to grow in love. John becomes a test case for the Lord, an experiment, but entirely in love. Apart from his Mother, no one perhaps has understood the Incarnation better than John, because the naturalness of love is so great in him. He loves God the Father also because he has given him a friend in his Son. Not only a model, not only a master, not only a Lord and God, but a close friend. Not only a lord, but a brother. Not only one who in all things surpasses him, but also one with whom he can share everything in simplicity of heart. He loves the Son, from whom he learns how to work for God but also how one rests in God, how one adores God and how one loves the neighbor, how one receives faith from God and also how one gives this faith to God with thanksgiving, even how one receives the gift of the Son from the Father’s hands and how one gives the Son back to the Father in the bitter hour of the Cross.

There is, of course, also for John a way, a development, a guidance, because every meeting with the Lord mediates new insights and new outlooks. Yet it is not really a development, for John has given everything already in the first hour in unconditional love. When he was about to call fire down on Samaria, he did it because there was already an absolute knowledge of the power God gives to those who believe. Already then he did not need this test in order to believe. But the question whether to call fire down from heaven can be asked quite naively, for John is quite sure that he has power over the fire in the Lord’s love. Did the Lord not say that faith moves mountains? When the mother of the sons of Zebedee asks the Lord to place her sons at his right hand and his left in his Kingdom, John in his childlike relationship with the Lord is not wholly innocent of this. If a father has ten children and wants to go for a walk with them, all would like to hold his hand, but he can give his hand to only two of them. And insofar as John is very close to the Lord, the mother’s petition is also his own. But he does not make it himself and has no need of doing so. The Lord’s reply is addressed to him: Can you drink the chalice? John is human, even in his sanctity; he must be stretched by the Lord. His reply comes unhesitatingly: We can. From his lips this is not presumption. It is a reply of love. It is the conformity to the Lord to which he is accustomed every day. One does what the Lord does, what he wants and demands; there are no problems. Every question has already found its solution in the grace of the Lord’s love.

A child has no problems either when the mother is present and deals with all the difficulties. We can, says love, and in deepest faith; it is also a blind faith. It sounds childlike, perhaps even comical to the outsider. But it is the answer of surrender. John will simply go with the Lord, without asking questions. To the Last Supper, to the Cross, to the reception of the Mother of the Lord, to the Acts of the Apostles, to the mission of the Gospel, and to the Letters. To the painful difficulties about which the third Letter allows us to guess. It is a constant progression and enlargement to ever-new missions. The last task, the Apocalypse [Revelation], reveals that at that time John had been truly placed by the Lord into his particular mode of being, his own outline. He can drink the chalice. The word that looked like an exaggeration has, unknown to himself, revealed what he is: his human and eternal intrinsic being, given by the eternal being of the Son, given with such superabundance that he can already bear today, as earthly man, the mysteries of heaven that the Lord unlocks for him. He can do it because it is thus the Lord needs him. He disposes of John in such a way that he can communicate to him the mysteries of heaven also in this form. John needs to know this from the beginning. Of himself he could not have any access to it. He experiences all this through the grace of the Lord’s love. His personal love for the Lord, which he is the only one to stress in the Gospel, makes it possible for him more than others to return after the vision of the Apocalypse into the narrow boundaries of human life, asking no place other than the one held by the rest of the Apostles and evangelists.

Knowing the Lord’s love as he does, John especially knows the Lord as the one who is ever-greater. This is first of all the ever greater that is at work between the friends Christ and John. Secondly, it is the ever-greater that John experiences in prayer and in preaching. Thirdly, it is the ever-greater that is revealed in the visions of the Apocalypse.

Living in each other’s company creates between the Lord and John a relationship that brings John the fullness of friendship. He is filled with it to overflowing. It is not merely a human friendship between two men; within its humanness it increasingly shows the marks of the mission. The mission of Christ and the mission of the Apostle. John comes to know that the Lord needs him. That he needs him as he is in order that he can use him as the one he is to become. That the Lord makes him into an instrument he can take into his hand and make use of as seems good to him. John does not discover this as one gets the clue to some strange, dark secret that could be dangerous or threatening. He becomes aware of it in his love, which knows once and for all that the Lord is truth, absolute truth, a truth much greater, much truer than anything one could think of and plan oneself. A truth that is the ray and mark of the divine, which the Lord fully knows, which is at his disposal, and of which he freely in his friendship shares with his friend whatever seems good to himself. And since this infinite freedom of the Lord is one with his love, there is no room for a question within this friendship and in its service, no question of the Lord to John, because he can count on him; no question of John to the Lord, because he is sure of him in his friendship, his love, his adoration. And it is the friendship that draws to adoration. In ottering his own friendship to the other Apostles, in loving his neighbor, in meeting any other man, he is always aware of how the Lord loves him and that this love must not come to a standstill in him. He must serve the Lord as a model of every form of love for the others. This, too, is not forced on him; it happens quite naturally. It is so natural that John moves in the same spirit from friendship to adoration. He is friend while adoring and adorer while being friend. This happens in a way impossible with men, but that is the condition that makes it possible for the Lord to offer John his friendship and for him not to misuse it. There is here a tremendous manly tactfulness. Respect in love. This is the quality of the first ever-greater, which grows out of the contact with the Lord, and forms the background against which the human person of the Lord stands out and its contours become clear.

Then there is the ever-more in word, prayer and proclamation. The Lord gives his word to John as to the other Apostles. He speaks with him; perhaps he uses more words of friendship with him than with the others. Each of these words is a gift to the disciple and at first appears quite clearcut and ordinary. But when he remains with this word, he becomes ever more aware of its content, which goes much deeper than he first surmised. It provides ever-new amazement. He had been on the lookout for some definite expression, but the form keeps surpassing itself. And now he is obliged to proclaim this word, to preach it, to bring it to others. He must give it a face in the mission, in the good news. Because he loves, he notices that the word grows beyond him in its proclamation, that it stretches to a greatness that is again the Lord’s; it becomes the word that flows from God and returns to him, expanding to ever-greater proportions before his astonished eyes, because it is part of the teaching and participates in the life of Christ with the Father and the Spirit and must return to this fullness, to God. Love allows the disciple to behold this ever-greater of the divine word, and it is love that draws men into this expansion. It is as if the word of proclamation also were becoming loaded with all the human things it meets in order to bring them home to the triune God. When John is alone in prayer and begins to repeat the words the Lord taught him, he feels that his speaking is mere stammering, for it is not he who controls the word; rather, the word controls him and takes him prisoner. It is the divine word that offered itself to him within a special intimate perspective of the Lord, which through this friendship stretches into what is perfectly divine in the Lord. From the beginning it was the expression of friendship of one who believed, and in prayer it becomes through this friendship more and more the expression of faith and intertrinitarian relationship. The word receives a power John would never have expected it to have at the moment when he heard and received it. This very fact, that in every prayer he first feels the friendship and is led by it through the power of the word to adoration, proves to him the charming power of the word—not a charm of magic or unreality, but the charming power of love in its full reality and fulfillment in the Lord who is God. Everything earthly takes on wings to God. Everything the Lord says receives wings, which expand the word into something experienced, and the experience into what is heavenly. Through the word John participates in the Lord’s being in heaven. His friendship with the Lord is not bounded by its earthly horizon. It leads into eternity and opens into eternal life, but it does so as something never to be grasped, which is ever more infinite, ever greater.

Conscious of this ever-greater quality of the word, John writes the Gospel and the Letters under the inspiration of the Spirit and led by him. He does not write without understanding what he writes or without an overall view of the words he uses, but neither without seeing every word expand into the ever-greater. Obedience is for him of double importance here. Left to his own vision, he would not be able to proceed; every word he writes down would reveal to him such infinite treasures, betray so many mysteries that he would be engulfed in contemplation. Obedience keeps him firmly in its hand. This obedience does not master him, does not change him into someone else, but it makes it possible for him to write. Here lies one difference between him and the Synoptics, who did not walk equally close with the Lord in friendship and were not so personally involved. For them it is less necessary to seek the absolute unity between the person and the mission, between life and action, which from the beginning was given to John, in whose mission something unique of the love of the Lord comes to flower.

Finally, there is the ever-greater of the Apocalypse. The vision John is given here is parallel to his vision of the Lord on earth. The Lord was a man for him, but as man he was God. John never found a discrepancy between his divinity and his humanity. Through the manhood of Jesus he constantly touched God, Now in the Apocalypse he is constantly led through the heavenly to the earthly. It is like a translation backward. Though not forced on him, it is given to him nonetheless irrevocably. It is given to him because he gave himself to the Lord on earth in obedience in the same way as the Spirit now carries him into the vision. What he is shown is very unusual, but he sees in it everywhere the unusualness of the ever-greater God, open to him here in the same way as the usualness of the incarnate Lord. He sees the mysteries of the Mother, the mysteries of the Son of Man, the mysteries of the angels and the animals. They bear for him the character of mystery within a concrete visibility. Again he sees, hears, touches, as he did see, hear, and touch on earth the word of life in the Lord. It is very significant that he is given the book to eat in the vision in order to take it into himself and understand it. He can find words to say the heavenly things, words of this life, which however make room everywhere for the greater things of heaven. The form of the mystery is not touched. He eats the book—the book that cannot be read from outside. It has to be interpreted from the within of love, that love that reverently recognizes God and the mysteries of God in the ever-greater of the Son, touching them only insofar as they belong to the mission, are given as task in order to be communicated.

The prophets of the Old Covenant did have similar visions, but they saw within the promises. John sees within the fulfillment. He sees with the whole meaning of the Christ he has experienced. His seeing is postincarnational; and the Joannine element in his seeing is the greatness of his love, which can bear seeing such things and including them in his mission, almost in spite of the love that proves itself alive in him. It is no longer a seeing of merely getting to know. It is a seeing in the knowing of love, a seeing of living love. A seeing founded in the mystery that John has known the Lord as man and as friend. In the Old Covenant the seeing was a premonition; the seeing of John is that of experience. In John the experience covers the premonition in the same way as the fulfilment in the Lord covers the promise.

During the period of life remaining to him after writing Revelation, John has a different image of the Lord, an almost incredible one. A real image of the ever-greater one, complementing the Gospel through its opposite. He has seen the Verbum caro factum; but as long as the Lord walked on earth, his great experience was the Verbum. It seemed to him then that the word he heard, received, and passed on held in itself all the Lord’s power. After the experience of the Apocalypse he sees first of all the Caro factum; in his vision also he sees more of the boundaries the Lord accepted in order to become incarnate, and he sees these boundaries totally emerge from his ever being ever more.

THE PROLOGUE

THE WORD IN THE BEGINNING:

REVELATION

1:1. In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And God was the word.

In the beginning was the Word. If the word was in the beginning, then it was not the beginning, and the beginning was not the word. For the word was in the beginning. The beginning is the origin, the absolute beginning, the source, the alpha; all beginning, origin as such, is utterly incomprehensible, intangible, colorless, timeless, forever beyond our grasp; it is that which always was. It is the divine and the fathomless in God. If there were anything corresponding to becoming in God, the beginning would be his eternal becoming. If there were growth or increase in God, the beginning would be his eternal increase. If there were darkness in God, the beginning would be his eternal darkness. But: in the beginning was the word. The word is expression, language, fulfilment, light. So that in God the beginning was ever reality, the origin was always being, his fathomless abyss was always light. In God there was never any contradiction between the beginning and the word, for the word was in the beginning, the beginning in the word; the word was not only with God; the word itself was God: and God was the word.

Yet the beginning was not the word, and the word was not the beginning. Life as we know it is full of oppositions and contradictions; they are a condition of life. The life that originates in this world only subsequently becomes the word; for though the word was implicit in life from the first, so that life might become what it already is, as the word fulfilled it is born out of the beginning. For life in the world is doing and suffering; being and growth; light and darkness; foundation, end and aim. But for oppositions and contradictions there would be no becoming, no movement, no growth and consequently no life.

God is eternal life, and because he is eternal there is no contradiction in him; it is wiped out eternally in Ins unity. But since, nevertheless, God is life, his life can only be conceived and pictured as the antithesis between the beginning and the word. God manifests his life by bringing all contradictions and oppositions in the world to unity in himself, leading them up to his unity; for the life of God consists not only of his goodness and greatness and light but equally of his power over death and darkness, his authority over small things, his dominion over evil. We move from darkness into light, because in us the word is not in the beginning. In God the word is in the beginning; he is therefore eternal light, and there is no darkness in him.

In God, then, the beginning and the word were present from the beginning. That is why the beginning contained the word of God from the beginning. The word, considered apart and in itself, is not the beginning; it is the very opposite of the beginning: it is the fulfilment. For the opposite of the beginning is not the end, but the fulfilment. Indeed, the word is so essentially the fulfilment of the beginning that it is essentially the power to originate, to bring forth new beginnings, and in so doing, in the very act of fulfilment, it becomes the source and the beginning for us. Wherever the word acts there is a beginning, a completely fresh start behind which it is impossible to go and that can never be undone. Such is the fruitfulness and the glory of the word of God that every word spoken by him is spoken for all eternity. One can never say of God’s word that it was not uttered or that it remained without effect. His word is power, and all things that were made were made by his word and by him alone. And without his word was made nothing that was made. His word is not like the word of man, which can be set aside and disregarded. It is eternally active because it is eternal life. Whenever it touches something, it brings forth life. For it is the eternal word, the absolute word, independent of an answer. The word of God sounds, though no one listens. It does not, as with men, call for a dialogue between equals. Where the word of God is concerned, the hearer vanishes to nothing. Whether we receive it or not, it is creative: once spoken, the effect follows and demonstrates that the word is the fulfilment.

The word that fulfils is creative; the fount and source of origins has the beginning within it. It is indeed in the beginning. It has the beginning eternally behind it, because it was eternally in the beginning. But equally it has the beginning eternally within it, for it has power over the beginning. It is in the beginning; it does not become the word in the beginning. Regarded as the fulfilment, it bears the beginning within it like a seed. A word always means something; it is an indication, a pointer, a sign and consequently an undertaking, a promise of something more. Not being the beginning, it has the beginning within it. It is the fruit as well as the seed of the beginning. All origins begin in the word. The word is never added subsequently to a beginning. There is no darkness that is not surrounded by its light. No becoming that does not find meaning, form and mission in the word, nor any being that might not have an ever-new beginning in the word.

And because the word has the beginning in it, nothing fulfilled in the word is an end, just as nothing God says or reveals to us has an end without a beginning concealed within it as seed. On the contrary, it is always a new beginning. The unity of the beginning and the word consists in their unendingness; both are open to increase without end. Where man awaits an end, the word awaits him, the word that was in the beginning and signifies a new beginning. Where man believes he has understood the word in the fulfilment of it, he is seized by the word as promise and led on to a new mission. Because no fulfilment is ever an end, he knows that he stands in the presence of God.

The word was with God as the expression of the beginning and therefore as the form of divine revelation: the beginning expresses itself in the word, and so the word is in the beginning, ready and willing to be expressed, to be sent forth and taken back. The fact that the word is expressed and sent forth is the fulfilment of the beginning, insofar as everything unexpressed is expressed and everything without form receives form in the word. It is in the word that the beginning receives color and tone, and God communicates himself in the word. It is therefore in the word that God can distinguish himself from himself and in that way communicate knowledge about himself. But since the beginning expresses itself in the word, and since God sends forth the word, the word is simultaneously taken back into the beginning and into God. For the beginning finds its form and thus its fulfilment in the word, and the word fulfills itself in an equal degree from out of the beginning and back into the beginning: its going forth and its return are one, and neither is thinkable without the other.

As the beginning, God declares that he is. As the word, he declares who he is. If God were known only as the beginning, the world would not know who he is. The beginning is the God to whom there is no access. He is the incommensurable—so far above us that we are not merely unable to conceive it, but also remain unmoved by its greatness.

We are men living in time, in a finite world, and only finite things mean anything to us. There is nothing in us open to pure infinity. The infinite is what we cannot imagine, and that is why it means nothing to us. It has none of the characteristics we know. It cannot be felt, cannot be measured and being incomprehensible it does not awaken any demands in us. Of a God like that we should know only that beyond our horizon lay the infinite from which perhaps we derive—for after all we and the things about us originate somewhere—but we should not be moved by longing to strive toward the unknown as to our aim and end. As long as we are not spoken to by his word, we are unable to say a single word to him, for in that case we should be without the word. Even if we had grasped that there was some relation between the foundation of the world and ourselves, we could still only give it names we had invented and a content such as already existed in the world. We should perhaps know that our life, not being eternal life, needed to be given form; we should try to draw up certain laws based on our own experience of life and on that of the human race so as to order this existence of ours on proper lines, and in doing so we should perhaps discover something corresponding to the natural law. But these limits and laws, expressing a moral of existence, though conceived against the background of an unattainable unknown, would consist solely of negatives, and they would not help us to decipher the silent unknown or bring it closer to us. It is only when the beginning has become word for us that our relation to the unknown gives birth to a longing for God and thus to love, which transforms all laws into something positive. Only when the beginning expresses itself as word are we able to learn to know God, not only as our fulfilment, but even as the divine beginning.

God never creates without the word, and all things that were made were made by him in the word. Nevertheless God speaks to us in two ways in the word. There is the silent word of God in the happenings of the world and the events of our daily lives. When God takes away what a man holds dearest, he speaks to him in that event. It is a question addressed to him, or an answer. It is in fact a communication that fulfills its promise, for the word of God is always both an action and an accomplished action. But mankind did not want to understand God’s language in that form; men could not endure the silent word; they wanted and always want explanations. They behave as they do because they are lacking in love, for love can interpret a silent communication equally well. God therefore parted with his word, sent it into the world, and gave man the explicit word. And when it appeared in the world men were able to apprehend it; it could be heard and understood. The word of God began to speak in the language of men, putting questions and giving answers; questions and answers that sound and echo from the beginning, spoken among men, audible and distinct.

This word, which came from God, which was sent forth by God, answered all the questions that man could ask God and withheld no answer that God could give man: these answers are given in all that the word said on earth, in all that is deposited in Scripture and in all that was instituted, so that the whole relationship between God and man is expressed in the Church and the sacraments. The explicit word made man, too, was in the beginning, contained in God from the first. And just as Jesus Christ, the word made flesh, is in every word of the creation and of the order of salvation, being the very foundation and aim of everything unexpressed and hidden, so too are the Church and the sacraments. They too are present in the unexpressed word of God, contained in the word from the beginning, because while not yet instituted and still unexpressed, formless and to us unimaginable, they are already contained therein and themselves contain that which constitutes the fullness of the love of God. Both the sacraments and the Church were in the beginning, as they now exist, as his love, foreseen in every detail. They are, therefore, unexpressed but most really present in the opening verses of John’s Prologue.

The word spoke as that which it is: as the word that was in the beginning. It makes known to us the beginning, that beginning which was before us, which is always before us, however far back we may go to reach firm ground—and by making the beginning known to us, it enables us to realize that in relation to the word we ourselves are only a beginning and can never be anything else. No one who has heard the word of God can say more of himself than that he is at the beginning. No one, though he has taken a thousand steps, can ever say that he has put even one step behind him and need not take the first step. Beginning is the form of the Christian life.

To be a Christian means to promise; it is a ceaseless undertaking that, as such, is never fulfilled; it means striving, seeking, struggling, straining, longing, knocking at the door; it is something always opening without ever being open, always unfolding and always trying to escape from the human center, which it can no longer endure. Within this ceaseless growth is the circle of joy and suffering, the one within the other, neither conceivable without the other—and not merely balancing and neutralizing each other (for in that case they would not be Christian)—but both present simultaneously, linked one within the other, in such a way that each and every suffering has its joy within it, or gives birth to joy, and every joy its suffering (just as a mother’s joy over her child is concealed in her pains, and concealed in that joy is the suffering the child will subsequently cause her, and in that suffering again the joy of having suffered for it, each eternally dovetailed into the other). Joy and suffering are the one indivisible form of this ceaselessly expanding life, which consists in being burst open, that is, of life unfolding in the beginning.

It is the word that breaks into man’s life in this way. The word always says something that becomes; it promises a truth that is never fulfilled because the truth is always richer than any finite fulfilment. It is a promise that is never kept to the end because it always leads and promises to lead to new possibilities beyond the reality known to us. When first the word enters into a man, his whole being is shaken to its depths, his heart is set on fire, and he is tempted to turn his inmost self outward and lift it toward the word. Then even what is told us about the beginning we can never grasp arouses a great longing in us. Word and fire are one, and we are drawn to the flame to be utterly consumed. The word and the demand are one, and understanding the word, we take everything upon ourselves in order to fulfill its demand. But each time we promise to fulfill the demand and keep the word, each time we take a step to meet the word and try to love, when we spread what we have before him, turning our inmost self outward so as to make a gift of it, we at once become cold again, tepid again, and once again we are at the beginning; for only the eternal word contains within itself completed action, whereas we never do.

In this sense the revelation of the word always makes too great a demand upon the creature. At first the word that God addresses to us looks harmless, like a human word. But instantly the fire within it begins to stir, insatiably embracing everything, demanding everything, consuming everything. At first the word of God appears to be a word one can answer; it seems as though the balance between speech and reply could be maintained. But as one begins to understand that the divine word is eternally in the beginning, it becomes more and more clear that man’s starting point never reaches the point of beginning and falls farther and farther behind. Skill and art of a human kind can always be learned, even though the purpose of the first lessons may not be clear. But gradually we acquire confidence, survey the subject as a whole, and with practice learn to master it. In learning the language and the art of God, in contrast, our view of the whole progressively diminishes. All our supports are wrested from us, and what remains are an ever-deeper insight into our failure and an increasing longing. We lapse farther and farther into the beginning.

All human accomplishments develop in an orderly manner according to some method or following some plan. Anyone wishing to learn a foreign language adopts a definite method. We imagine we can approach the word of God in the same way and grow perfect in relation to him. But as often as our plan in relation to God seems to us to be bordering on the maximum, it turns out to be the minimum from God’s point of view, a method that has not even grasped the first word of God’s language. Our own program will call for the performance of a maximum of devotions, but a minimum of real devotion. We confuse devotions and devotion, offering God the former in order to withhold the latter. Our whole performance before God is a pharisaical program, the center of which is our own perfection, with the result that it is blind to the word spoken to us, the ever-new and ever-unexpected word. The whole of man’s progress consists in the perpetual destruction of the human center, thus making way for the ever-new beginning in which is heard the word. For the word alone leads to God and to the beginning. Man can be led to the beginning only if he himself is in the beginning. The only way to love is to overcome one’s own point of view.

Man lives in three stages: beginning, center and fire. But since man has no center in himself and may not have one, he is led by the word into the fire, so that he may come to the beginning, which is God. Beginning and fire are one.

THE WORD IN GOD

1:2. The same was in the beginning with God.

The eternal word is never the beginning, the origin. It is born eternally of the beginning. The beginning is Father; the word is Son. But in the beginning was the word, and because the Son is in the Father, the word is not a continuation proceeding from the beginning, and the Son is not a continuation proceeding from the Father. Being the Father’s word, the Son is a fresh beginning, because the eternal Father is eternally the same, and the Son cannot have a being different from the Father’s. Yet the Son is not the Father, for the word was with God.

And this indicates a distinction. God and the word are not the same. What God is cannot be said: he is everything, the fullness, the origin, the beginning of everything. It is he who gives everything, and the Son is he who has everything, because everything is given him by the Father. It is the Father who possesses all love and gives it to the Son, and the Son is he who receives all love and so desires to lavish love on others, because he has received it in such abundance. This river of love is the common life of Father and Son; it is their "being