‘The rule of fire is yet to come.’
Week 22 of the Calendar Year
From 8th December 2024, journal 26.
As part of my morning sit I read the following passages from Mechthild of Magdeburg’s medieval mystical masterpiece, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, written between 1240 - 1270. My body was ablaze, my mind in awe, as I read her exquisite words.
Book VI, chapter 29. Ten Parts of Divine Fire out of God’s Nobility
An unworthy person pondered in her simplicity God’s nobility. And God let her recognize in her senses and see with the eyes of her soul a fire that burned unceasingly in the heights above all things. The fire had been burning without a beginning and shall keep on burning without end. This fire is God eternal, who holds within himself eternal life and from whom all things have come forth. The sparks of the fire that have shot forth are the holy angels…. The rule of fire is yet to come. That is, Jesus Christ, to whom his heavenly Father has entrusted the first redemption and the last judgment. On the last day, out of the embers, he shall fashion for the heavenly Father the most exquisite chalices from which at his eternal wedding feast he himself shall drink all the holiness that, together with his dear Son, he has poured into our soul and into our human understanding.
Ah, I shall drink of you
And you shall drink of me
All the goodness that God has preserved in us.
Happy is [s]he who stands firm
And does not let spill
What God has poured into [her].
…. The comfort of the fire is the delightful pleasure that our soul receives inwardly from God through the warmth of the divine fire, so sacred that we, on fire, reflect back toward the heavenly fire, and we persevere in virtue so that we are not extinguished. …
The radiance of the fire is the gleaming sight of the divine countenance of the Holy Trinity that shall flood our body and soul with light, so that we shall see and know there the marvelous bliss that here we cannot even name.
These things have come out of this fire and flow back into it, each according to God’s disposition, in eternal praise.
Whoever wishes to speak more about this,
Let him prostrate himself in this fire
And see and taste how the Godhead flows,
How humanity pours,
How the Holy Spirit wrestles
And vanquishes many a heart,
Forcing it to love God in many different ways.
End.
Such beauty to read … and fire burning intensely in my body as I read.
Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, translated, Frank Tobin, Classics of Western Spirituality.
Image, book cover, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, CWS.
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