For his followers to know him is to know where they are going and why they are going there and to be vouchsafed the strength to follow the way to the end.

There is a day
when the road neither
comes nor goes, and the way
is not a way but a place.

We follow by going ahead of what we know is coming.

“West of Here”

One time there wasn’t any door; I turned to look
where I had been—only that? Only
those meaningless windows leading down one
by one to the faint small beginning?

Past the middle of life and nothing
done—but a voice came on: “I am
the door,” someone said. I closed my eyes;
whatever I touched led on. (p. 205f.)

“A Journey,”

The road goes down. It stops at the sea.

The sea goes on. It stops at the sky.

The sky goes on.  At the end of the road—picknickers,
rocks. We stand and look out:

Another sky where this one ends?
And another sea?
And a world, and a road?

And what about you?
And what about me? (p. 151)

Once we talked about the life to come.
I took the Bible from the nightstand
and offered John 14: “I go to prepare
a place for you.” “Fine. Good,” he said.
“But what about Matthew? ‘You, therefore,
must be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect.’” And he wept.

Yet surely, Lord,
among your many mansions
there has been a room
or two set by
for drop-ins
such as me.

Commonly Bill recited from John 14
“I go to make a place,” then shrugged and sang the Wobbly
hymn. “You’ll eat pie in the sky by and by—when you die.” (p. 6)

Bill dying shriveled and absolved wrote on a yellow
pad, “Jesus who walked from the tomb has made us a place.” (p. 9)

They bathe inwardly in light, but in this incandescence they retain—this is not strong enough, they exalt—all that is most specific in their attributes. We can only lose ourselves in God by prolonging the most individual characteristics of beings far beyond themselves: that is the fundamental rule by which we can always distinguish the true mystic from his counterfeits. The heart of God is boundless multae mansiones.

In the Gospel of John, when the disciple Thomas mistakes Jesus for the way to an abstract and certain truth, Jesus quickly sets him straight, saying “I am the way, the truth and the life.” And here, it seems to me is the life of the church—any Christian church—as it struggles to interpret the scriptures, and the Word of God himself, in a life-giving way. Jesus Christ asks us to interpret ourselves, and each other, with the same hospitable, good-hearted diligence that we grant him. He offers the truth not as a thing but as a way, an opening on the path between the spirit and the letter of the law.

He is the Way
Follow Him through the land of Unlikeness,
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life!
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

thou art the way the truth and the life: the way by doctrine, precepts and examples: the truth in promises; and the life in reward: … suffer me not at any time to stray from thee which art the way; not to distrust thy promises which art the truth, and performest whatsoever thou promisest; nor to rest in any other thing than thee, which art the way beyond which there is nothing to be desired … By thee we have learned the sure and ready way to true salvation to the intent we should not wander any longer up and down in the mazes of the world.

 “No one comes to the Father except through me.” This claim is unsettling to our modern ears, because we fear such a claim does not comport well with our commitment to being a tolerant people. We believe that our ability to tolerate one another is the best alternative we have to avoid the violence that dominates our history.

Christ did not know the truth but was the truth. Not as if he did not know what truth is, but when one is the truth and when the requirement is to be in the truth, to merely “know” the truth is insufficient – it is an untruth. For knowing the truth is something that follows as a matter of course from being in the truth, not the other way around. Nobody knows more of the truth than what he is of the truth. To properly know the truth is to be in the truth; it is to have the truth for one’s life. This always costs a struggle. Any other kind of knowledge is a falsification. In short, the truth, if it is really there, is a being, a life. The Gospel says that this is eternal life, to know the only true God and the one whom he sent, the truth (Jn. 17:3). That is, I only know the truth when it becomes a life in me.

Truth is not a deposit of acquired knowledge, the yield. This might have been if Christ had been, for example, a teacher of truth, a thinker, one who made a discovery. But Christ is the way as well as the truth. His teaching is infinitely superior to all the inventions of any and every age, an eternity older and an eternity higher than all systems, even the very newest. His teaching is the truth – not in terms of knowledge, but in the sense that the truth is a way – and as the God-man he is and remains the way; something that no human being, however zealously he professes that the truth is the way, dare assert of himself without blasphemy.

Christ compares truth to food and appropriating it to eating it (Jn. :–). Just as food is appropriated (assimilated) and thereby becomes the sustenance of life, so also spiritually, truth is both the giver and the sustenance of life. It is life. Therefore one can see what a monstrous mistake it is to impart or represent

…  The truth is lived before it is understood. It must be fought for, tested, and appropriated. Truth is the way. And when the truth is the way, then the way cannot be shortened or drop out unless the truth itself is distorted or drops out. Is this not too difficult to understand? Anyone will easily understand it if he just gives himself to it.

It is not by light, the way we find
the truth. And not by sound. Like dawn from night
a certainty from far intrudes and is.
We turn, deny, evade: it finds us out.
Christ came that way.

History held its breath. An otherness
amid all hearts began to yearn, to reach,
gather itself to be, and was. Born from need,
first came the source, then truth and light.
That way, Christ came.

And comes again. Every flower from dirt
proclaims its version; water finds whatever
there is to find; we climb to discover the kingdom—
so long a climb—and come to see at the end,
when we close our eyes.

Early in the gospel, Philip has been given one of the greatest straight lines in history. When, as a newly converted follower of Jesus, he evangelizes Nathaniel, who scorns Jesus, saying “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip says, simply, “Come and see” (John 1:46). Much later, however, we find a poignant scene in which Jesus, knowing that he is soon to die, questions the disciples, beginning with Philip: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” (John 14:9).

Your race run, the rest of us,
mother, sisters, sister’s boyfriends,
ran repairs. Trimmed the hedge,
whited the walls, weeded the stones.

The place looked five years younger—
you might not have recognized it.
It took you dead to harness us,
give us some common, Tolstoyan purpose.

God is always calling on us to do the impossible. It helps me to remember that anything Jesus did during his life here on earth is something we should be able to do, too.

breathe out
breathe in
breathe out
breathe in

I go away
and I will come
breathe out
breathe in

I leave you
the Spirit comes
breathe out
breathe in

do not be troubled
trust in return
breathe out
breathe in

empty
full
breathe out
breathe in

my peace
I leave with you
breathe out
breathe in

In John’s particular slant the Holy Spirit brings to completion the work started by the Son. The shortness of his earthly ministry having prevented Jesus from delivering the full revelation of the words of the Father, the continuation of his unfinished enterprise was left to another heavenly being called in legal language the “other Paraclete” (14:16), i.e., advocate or counselor … This innovation shows that John was fully aware of the large gap which separated his message from teaching traceable to the age of Jesus, and that the gigantic doctrinal development contained in his Gospel required justification.

How can we live and love as [Jesus] did, except through the mysterious gift and power which he gives through his Spirit, so that we become his face, his hands, his heart and body. (p. 200)

The objections to Christianity may be dismissed with one single comment: Do these objections come from someone who has carried out the commands of Christ? If not, all his objections are nonsense. Christ continually declares that we must do what he says – and then we will know that it is truth. (p. 255)

We can put faith first and imitation second, inasmuch as it is necessary for me to have faith in that which I am to imitate. But we must also put imitation first and faith second. I must, by some action, be marked in some measure by conformity to Christ, and thus collide with the world. Without some kind of situational tension, there is no real opportunity of becoming a believer. (p. 278 f.)

Wilt thou love God, as he thee? then digest,
My soule, this wholsome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by Angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his Temple in thy brest.
The Father having begot a Sonne most blest,
And still begetting, (for he ne’r begonne)
Hath deign’d to chuse thee by adoption,
Coheire to his glory, and Sabbaths endless rest;
And as a robb’d man, which by search doth finde
His stolne stuffe sold, must lose or buy it againe:
The Sonne of glory came downe, and was slaine,
Us whom he had made, and Satan stolne, to unbinde.
’Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.

In heaven, God’s will is done and the Master teaches the child to ask that the will may be done on earth just as in heaven; in the spirit of adoring submission and ready obedience. Because the will of God is glory in heaven, the doing of it the blessedness of heaven. As the will is done, the kingdom of heaven comes into the heart.