All this religious resignation. And the paradox of prayer: people praying
one minute, "Thy will be done," then praying for things to happen or not
happen, just as they please.
God's will be done--as if it wouldn't be done whatever they did or didn't
do. God's will was your fate. The thing was to know it and not waste your
strength in the illusion of resistance.
If you were part of God your will was God's will at the moment when you
really willed. There was always a point when you knew it: the flash point
of freedom. You couldn't mistake your flash when it came. You couldn't
doubt away that certainty of freedom any more than you could doubt away
the certainty of necessity and determination. From the outside they were
part of the show of existence, the illusion of separation from God. From
the inside they were God's will, the way things were willed. Free-will
was the reality underneath the illusion of necessity. The flash point of
freedom was your consciousness of God.
Then praying would be willing. There would be no such thing as passive
prayer. There could be no surrender.... And yet there was. Not the
surrender of your will, but of all the things that entangle and confuse
it; that stand between it and you, between God and you. When you lay
still with your eyes shut and made the darkness come on, wave after wave,
blotting out your body and the world, blotting out everything but your
self and your will, that was a dying to live; a real dying, a real life.
The Christians got hold of real things and turned them into something
unreal, impossible to believe. The grace of God was a real thing. It was
that miracle of perfect happiness, with all its queerness, its divine
certainty and uncertainty. The Christians knew at least one thing about
it; they could see it had nothing to do with deserving. But it had
nothing to do with believing, either, or with being good and getting into
heaven. It _was_ heaven. It had to do with beauty, absolutely un-moral
beauty, more than anything else.
She couldn't see the way of it beyond that. It had come to her when she
was a child in brilliant, clear flashes; it had come again and again in
her adolescence, with more brilliant and clearer flashes; then, after
leaving her for twenty-three years, it had come like this--streaming in
and out of her till its ebb and flow were the rhythm of her life.
Why hadn't she known that this would happen, instead of being afraid that
she would "go like" Aunt Charlotte or Uncle Victor? People talked a lot
about compensation, but nobody told you that after forty-five life would
have this exquisite clearness and intensity.
Why, since it _could_ happen when you were young--reality breaking
through, if only in flashes coming and going, going altogether and
forgotten--why had you to wait so long before you could remember it and
be aware of it as one continuous, shining background? She had never been
aware of it before; she had only thought about and about it, about
Substance, the Thing-in-itself, Reality, God. Thinking was not being
aware.
She made it out more and more. For twenty-three years something had come
between her and reality. She could see what it was now. She had gone
through life wanting things, wanting people, clinging to the thought of
them, not able to keep off them and let them go.