The Works of "Fiona Macleod", Volume IV. Sharp Elizabeth Amelia

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СКАЧАТЬ there is no spiritual dream that is not true, no hope that shall for ever go famished, no tears that shall not be gathered into the brooding skies of compassion, to fall again in healing dews.

      What the Body could not, nor ever could see, and what to the Will was a darkness, or at best a bewildering mist, is now clear. There are mysteries of which I cannot write; not from any occult secret, but because they are so simple and inevitable, that, like the mystery of day and night, or the change of the seasons, or life and death, they must be learned by each, in his own way, in his own hour. It is not out of their light that I see; it is by these stars that I set forth, where else I should be as a shadow upon a trackless waste.

      But Love, I am come to realise, is the supreme deflecting force. Love "unloosens sins," unites failure, disintegrates the act; not by an inconceivable conflict with the immutable law of consequence, but by deflection. For the divine love follows the life, and turns and meets it at last, and in that meeting deflects: so that that which is mortal, evil, and what is of the mortal law, the act, sinks; and on the forehead of the divine law that which is alone inevitable survives and moves onward in the rhythm that is life. When we understand the mystery of Redemption, we shall understand what Love is. The expiatory is an unknown attribute in the Divine. Expiation is but the earthly burnt-offering of that in us that is mortal: Redemption, which is the spiritual absorption of the expiation due to others, and the measureless restitution in love of wrong humbly brought to the soul and consumed there – so that it issues a living force to meet and deflect – is the living witness in that of us which is immortal. Those who wrong us do indeed become our saviours. It is their expiation that we make ours: they must go free of us; and when they come again and discrown us, then in love we shall be at one and equal. So far, words may clothe thought; but, beyond, the soul knows there is no expiation. Except you redeem yourself, there is no God. Forgiveness is the dream of little children: beautiful because thus far we see and know, but no farther.

      I see now what madness it was, as so often happened, to despise the body. But one mystery has become clear to me through this strange quest of ours – though when I say "I," or "our," I know not whether it is the Body or the Will or the Soul that speaks, till I remember that triune marriage at the deathbed, and know that while each is consciously each – the one with memory, the other with knowledge and hope, the third with wisdom and faith – we are yet one, as are the yellow and the white and the violet in the single flame in this candle beside me. And this mystery is, that the body was not built of life-warmed clay merely to be the house of the soul. Were it so, were the soul unwed to its mortal comrades, it would be no more than a moment's uplifted wave on an infinite sea. Without memory, without hope, it would be no more than a breath of the Spirit. But before the Divine Power moulded us into substance, we were shaped by it in form. And form is, in the spiritual law, what the crystal is in the chemic law.

      For now I see clearly that the chief end of the body is to enable the soul to come into intimate union with the natural law, so that it may fulfil the divine law of Form, and be at one with all created life and yet be for ever itself and individual. By itself the soul would only vainly aspire; it has to learn to remember, to become at one with the wind and the grass and with all that lives and moves; to take its life from the root of the body, and its green life from the mind, and its flower and fragrance from what it may of itself obtain, not only from this world, but from its own dews, its own rainbows, dawn stars and evening stars, and vast incalculable fans of time and death. And this I have learned: that there is no absolute Truth, no absolute Beauty, even for the Soul. It may be that in the Divine Forges we shall be so moulded as to have perfect vision. Meanwhile only that Truth is deepest, that Beauty highest which is seen, not by the Soul only, or by the Mind, or by the Body, but all three as one. Let each be perfect in kind and perfect in unity. This is the signal meaning of the mystery. It is so inevitable that it has its blind descent to fetich as well as its divine ascension. But the ignoble use does not annul the noble purport, any more than the blindness of many obscures the dream of one.

      There could be no life hereafter for the soul were it not for the body, and what were that life without the mind, the child of both, whom the ancient seers knew and named Mnemosynê? Without memory life would be a void breath, immortality a vacuum.

      Ah, the glory of the lifting light! The new day is come. Farewell.

      IONA

      "There are moments when the soul takes wings: what it has to remember, it remembers: what it loves, it loves still more: what it longs for, to that it flies."

Iona

      A few places in the world are to be held holy, because of the love which consecrates them and the faith which enshrines them. Their names are themselves talismans of spiritual beauty. Of these is Iona.

      The Arabs speak of Mecca as a holy place before the time of the prophet, saying that Adam himself lies buried here: and, before Adam, that the Sons of Allah, who are called Angels, worshipped; and that when Allah Himself stood upon perfected Earth it was on this spot. And here, they add, when there is no man left upon earth, an angel shall gather up the dust of this world, and say to Allah, "There is nothing left of the whole earth but Mecca: and now Mecca is but the few grains of sand that I hold in the hollow of my palm, O Allah."

      In spiritual geography Iona is the Mecca of the Gael.

      It is but a small isle, fashioned of a little sand, a few grasses salt with the spray of an ever-restless wave, a few rocks that wade in heather and upon whose brows the sea-wind weaves the yellow lichen. But since the remotest days sacrosanct men have bowed here in worship. In this little island a lamp was lit whose flame lighted pagan Europe, from the Saxon in his fens to the swarthy folk who came by Greek waters to trade the Orient. Here Learning and Faith had their tranquil home, when the shadow of the sword lay upon all lands, from Syracuse by the Tyrrhene Sea to the rainy isles of Orcc. From age to age, lowly hearts have never ceased to bring their burthen here. Iona herself has given us for remembrance a fount of youth more wonderful than that which lies under her own boulders of Dûn-I. And here Hope waits.

      To tell the story of Iona is to go back to God, and to end in God.

      But to write of Iona, there are many ways of approach. No place that has a spiritual history can be revealed to those who know nothing of it by facts and descriptions. The approach may be through the obscure glens of another's mind and so out by the moonlit way, as well as by the track that thousands travel. I have nothing to say of Iona's acreage, or fisheries, or pastures: nothing of how the islanders live. These things are the accidental. There is small difference in simple life anywhere. Moreover, there are many to tell all that need be known.

      There is one Iona, a little island of the west. There is another Iona, of which I would speak. I do not say that it lies open to all. It is as we come that we find. If we come, bringing nothing with us, we go away ill-content, having seen and heard nothing of what we had vaguely expected to see or hear. It is another Iona than the Iona of sacred memories and prophecies: Iona the metropolis of dreams. None can understand it who does not see it through its pagan light, its Christian light, its singular blending of paganism and romance and spiritual beauty. There is, too, an Iona that is more than Gaelic, that is more than a place rainbow-lit with the seven desires of the world, the Iona that, if we will it so, is a mirror of your heart and of mine.

      History may be written in many ways, but I think that in days to come the method of spiritual history will be found more suggestive than the method of statistical history. The one will, in its own way, reveal inward life, and hidden significance, and palpable destiny: as the other, in the good but narrow way of convention, does with exactitude delineate features, narrate facts, and relate events. The true interpreter will as little despise the one as he will claim all for the other.

      And that is why I would speak here of Iona as befalls my pen, rather than as perhaps my pen should go: and choose legend and remembrance, and my own and other memories and associations, and knowledge of my own and others, and hidden meanings, and beauty СКАЧАТЬ