Revelations of Divine Love

Chapter 4: The Crown of Thorns

And in this, suddenly, I saw the red blood running down from under the garland, hot and fresh, plentiful and living, just as it was at the time the garland of thorns was pressed on His blessed head, He who was both God and man, the same who suffered for me. I knew truly and powerfully that it was He Himself who showed it to me, with nothing in between.

And in the same showing the Trinity suddenly filled my heart with the greatest joy, and I understood that so it shall be in heaven without end for all who come there. For the Trinity is God, God is the Trinity; the Trinity is our Maker, the Trinity is our Keeper, the Trinity is our everlasting Lover, the Trinity is our endless joy and our bliss, by our Lord Jesus Christ and in our Lord Jesus Christ. And this was shown in the first sight, and in all of them; for where Jesus appears, the blessed Trinity is understood, as I see it.

And I said, "Benedicite Dominus!" which is to say, "Bless the Lord!" I said it in reverence, meaning it with a mighty voice; and I was greatly astonished, for the wonder and marvel I felt that He who is so worthy of reverence and so fearsome would be so familiar with a sinful creature living in this wretched flesh.²

I took it that at that time our Lord Jesus, in His courteous love, wanted to give me comfort before the time of my temptation; for it seemed to me that I might well, by God's permission and under His keeping, be tempted by fiends before I died.

With this sight of His blessed Passion, together with the Godhead that I saw in my understanding, I knew well that it was strength enough for me, yes, and for every creature alive that shall be saved, against all the fiends of hell and against every spiritual enemy.

In this He brought our Lady Saint Mary to my understanding. I saw her spiritually, in bodily likeness: a simple maiden and a humble one, young in years, a little more than a child, of the stature she had when she conceived.

God also showed me in part the wisdom and the truth of her soul, and in it I understood the reverence with which she gazed on her God, who is her Maker, marveling with great reverence that He was willing to be born of her, who was a simple creature of His own making.

For this was her marveling: that He who was her Maker would be born of her who was made.

And this wisdom and truth, knowing the greatness of her Maker and the littleness of herself who was made, made her say very humbly to Gabriel, "Here I am, God's handmaid."

In this sight I truly understood that she is greater than all that God made beneath her, in worth and in fullness of grace; for above her is nothing that is made except the blessed humanity of Christ, as I see it.

Chapter 5: The Hazelnut

At the same time as I saw this sight of the bleeding head, our good Lord showed me a spiritual sight of His close and familiar love. I saw that He is everything that is good and comforting to help us.

He is our clothing. For love He wraps us and winds us about, embraces us and wholly encloses us, hangs about us for tender love, so that He may never leave us. And so in this sight I saw that He is everything that is good, as I understand it.

And in this He showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me; and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought, "What can this be?" And the answer came, in a general way:

"It is all that is made." I marveled how it could last, for it seemed to me that it might suddenly have dropped into nothing, it was so little.

And I was answered in my understanding: "It lasts, and always will, because God loves it. And in the same way everything has its being through the love of God."

In this little thing I saw three properties.

The first is that God made it.

The second is that God loves it.

The third is that God keeps it.

But what did I see in it? Truly, the Maker, the Keeper, the Lover. For until I am made one with Him in substance I can never have full rest or true bliss; that is to say, until I am so fastened to Him that there is nothing at all that is made between my God and me.

This little thing that is made, it seemed to me, might have dropped into nothing, it was so little.

We need to know this: that we should set no store by anything that is made, so as to love and have God, who is unmade.

For this is the reason we are not all at ease in heart and soul: we look for rest here in this thing that is so little, where there is no rest, and we do not know our God, who is all mighty, all wise and all good, for He is true rest.

God wants to be known, and it pleases Him that we rest in Him.

For all that is beneath Him is not enough for us.

And this is the reason no soul is at rest until it has been emptied of everything that is made. When it is willingly emptied, for love, so as to have Him who is everything, then it is able to receive spiritual rest.

And our good Lord also showed that it is a very great pleasure to Him when a simple soul comes to Him nakedly, plainly and familiarly. For this is the soul's natural dwelling, by the touch of the Holy Spirit, as I understand it in this showing: "God, of Your goodness, give me Yourself; for You are enough for me, and I can ask for nothing less that would be full honor to You. And if I ask for anything that is less, I am always left wanting. Only in You do I have everything."

And these words about the goodness of God are very dear to the soul, and come very close to the will of our Lord; for His goodness fills all His creatures and all His blessed works, without end.

For He is endlessness itself; and He made us for Himself alone, and restored us by His precious Passion, and always keeps us in His blessed love; and all this is of His goodness.

Chapter 6: Praying to His Goodness

This showing was given to my understanding to teach our soul to cling wisely to the goodness of God. And at the same time the way we usually pray was brought to my mind: how, for want of understanding love, we make use of many means, praying through this thing and that. Then I truly saw that it is more honor to God, and more true delight to Him, that we pray faithfully to Himself, to His goodness, and cling to it by His grace, with true understanding and steadfast belief, than if we made use of every means the heart can think of.

For if we make use of all these means, it is too little, and not full honor to God; but in His goodness is the whole of it, and nothing at all is lacking there.

For this, as I shall tell, came to my mind at the same time. We pray to God by His holy flesh and His precious blood, His holy Passion, His most precious death and His honored wounds; but all the blessed nature and the endless life that we have from all this is of the goodness of God. And we pray to Him by the love of His sweet Mother who bore Him; but all the help we have from her is of His goodness. And we pray by His holy cross, on which He died; but all the help and all the power that we have from that cross is of His goodness.

And in the same way, all the help we have from particular saints and from the whole blessed company of heaven, the precious love and the holy, endless friendship we have from them, is of His goodness.

For the means that the goodness of God has ordained to help us are very fair and very many.

The chief and principal of them is the blessed nature He took from the maiden, with all the means that went before it and came after it, which belong to our redemption and our endless salvation. And so it pleases Him that we seek Him and honor Him through means, understanding and knowing that He is the goodness of them all.

For the goodness of God is the highest prayer, and it comes down to us to the lowest part of our need. It quickens our soul and makes it live, and makes it grow in grace and virtue. It is nearest in nature and readiest in grace.

For it is the same grace that the soul seeks, and always shall, until we truly know our God, who has enclosed us all in Himself.

A man walks upright, and the food in his body is shut in as if in a well-made purse; and when the time of his necessity comes, the purse is opened and shut again, most decently.³

And that it is He who does this is shown where He says, "He comes down to us, to the lowest part of our need." For He does not despise what He has made, nor does He disdain to serve us in the simplest office that belongs to our body by nature, for love of the soul He made in His own likeness.

For as the body is clothed in its clothes, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the chest, so are we, soul and body, clothed and enclosed in the goodness of God; yes, and more intimately, for all these others waste and wear away, but the goodness of God is always whole, and nearer to us beyond any comparison.

For truly our Lover wants the soul to cling to Him with all its strength, and wants us always to be clinging to His goodness; for of all the things the heart can think of, this pleases God most and soonest succeeds.

For our soul is so preciously loved by Him who is highest that it surpasses the knowledge of every creature.

That is to say, there is no creature that is made that can know how much, and how sweetly, and how tenderly our Maker loves us. And so we may, with His grace and His help, stand in spiritual contemplation, marveling forever at this high, surpassing, immeasurable love that our Lord has for us in His goodness.

And so we may ask of our Lover, with reverence, all that we will; for our natural will is to have God, and the good will of God is to have us; and we can never stop willing or loving until we have Him in the fullness of joy.

And then we shall be able to will no more; for He wants us to be occupied in knowing and loving until the time comes when we shall be filled full in heaven.

And therefore this lesson of love was shown, with all that follows, as you shall see; for the strength and the ground of all of it was shown in the first sight. For of all things, gazing on the Maker and loving Him makes the soul seem least in its own sight, and fills it most with reverent dread and true humility, and with plenty of love for its fellow Christians.

Chapter 7: Like Drops from the Eaves

And to teach us this, as I understand it, our good Lord showed our Lady Mary at the same time; that is to say, the high wisdom and truth she had in gazing on her Maker.

This wisdom and truth made her see her God as so great, so high, so mighty and so good. The greatness and nobility of her vision of God filled her with reverent dread; and with it she saw herself so little and so low, so simple and so poor compared with her God, that this reverent dread filled her with humility. And on this ground she was filled with grace and every kind of virtue, and surpasses all creatures.

And all the time He was showing what I have just said in spiritual sight, I saw with bodily sight the plentiful bleeding of the head continuing. The great drops of blood fell down from under the garland like pellets, looking as if they had come out of the veins. As they came out they were brownish red, for the blood was very thick, and as they spread they turned bright red; and when they reached the brows, there they vanished.

And yet the bleeding went on until many things had been seen and understood; and all the while the fair head and the living head kept the same beauty and liveliness.

The abundance was like the drops of water that fall from the eaves of a house after a heavy shower of rain, falling so thick that no one could count them with any bodily skill. And for their roundness, as they spread out on the forehead, they were like the scales of a herring.

These three things came to my mind at the time: pellets, for the roundness of the blood as it came out; the scales of a herring, for the roundness as it spread; the drops from the eaves of a house, for the abundance past counting.

This showing was quick and alive, and hideous, and fearsome, and sweet, and lovely. And of everything I saw, this was the greatest comfort to me: that our good Lord, who is so worthy of reverence and so fearsome, is so familiar and so courteous. And this filled me most of all with delight and with sureness of soul.

And to help me understand this, He showed this plain example: "The greatest honor a solemn king or a great lord can do a poor servant is to be familiar with him; and above all if he shows it himself, with a full and true intention and a glad face, both in private and in public." Then this poor creature thinks, "Look, what more honor and joy could this noble lord give me than to show me, who am so little, this marvelous familiarity? Truly it is more joy and delight to me than if he gave me great gifts and remained distant in his manner."

This bodily example was shown so highly that this man's heart might be carried away, and he might almost forget himself for joy at this great familiarity.

That is how it is with our Lord Jesus and us. For truly it is the greatest joy there can be, as I see it, that He who is highest and mightiest, noblest and worthiest, is lowest and humblest, most familiar and most courteous. And truly and certainly He will show us all this marvelous joy when we see Him.

And this is what our good Lord wants: that we believe and trust, rejoice and delight, comfort ourselves and take solace, as far as we can with His grace and His help, until the time we see it truly. For the greatest fullness of joy that we shall have, as I see it, is this marvelous courtesy and familiarity of our Father, who is our Maker, in our Lord Jesus Christ, who is our Brother and our Savior.

But no one can know this marvelous familiarity in this life unless he has it by a special showing of our Lord, or by a great abundance of grace given inwardly by the Holy Spirit. Yet faith and belief, with love, deserve the reward; and so it is had by grace.

For our life is grounded in faith, with hope and love. The showing is made to whomever God wills, and it plainly teaches the same faith, opened up and made clear with many secret points that belong to our faith and belief, which it is an honor to know.

And when the showing, which is given for a time, has passed and is hidden, then faith keeps it, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, until the end of our life.

And so the showing is nothing other than the faith, no less and no more, as our Lord's meaning in this same matter will make plain by the time this book comes to its end.

Chapter 8: Six Things Understood

And as long as I saw this sight of the plentiful bleeding of the head, I could not stop saying these words: "Benedicite Dominus!" In this showing I understood six things.

The first is the tokens of the blessed Passion, and the plentiful shedding of His precious blood.

The second is the maiden who is His most dear Mother.

The third is the blessed Godhead, which always was and always shall be: all might, all wisdom and all love.

The fourth is everything He has made. For I know well that heaven and earth and all that is made are great and wide, fair and good; but the reason it looked so little to me was that I saw it in the presence of Him who is its Maker. To a soul that sees the Maker of all things, all that is made seems very little.

The fifth is that He made everything that is made for love, and by the same love it is kept, and shall be without end, as was said before.

The sixth is that God is everything that is good, as I see it; and the goodness that everything has, it is He.

And all this our Lord showed in the first sight, and gave me space and time to contemplate it. Then the bodily sight stopped, and the spiritual sight stayed in my understanding. And I waited in reverent dread, rejoicing in what I saw, and wishing, as far as I dared, to see more, if it were His will, or to see the same sight for longer.

In all this I was greatly moved in love toward my fellow Christians, that they might all see and know what I was seeing; for I wanted it to be a comfort to them, since all this sight was shown for everyone. Then I said to those who were with me, "Today is Judgment Day for me."

And I said this because I expected to die; for on the day that a man or a woman dies, he is judged individually, as he shall be forever, as I understand it.

I said it because I wanted them to love God the better, and to make them remember that this life is short, as they could see by my example. For all this time I expected to die, and that was a marvel to me, and in part a wonder; for it seemed to me that this vision was shown for those who would go on living. Everything I say of myself I mean on behalf of all my fellow Christians, for I am taught in the spiritual showing of our Lord God that this is what He means.

And so I beg you all, for God's sake, and I counsel you for your own good, to stop looking at the wretch to whom it was shown, and mightily, wisely and humbly to look at God, who in His courtesy, love and endless goodness wanted to show it for everyone, to comfort us all. For it is God's will that you take it with great joy and delight, as Jesus Christ has shown it to you.

Chapter 9: For All My Fellow Christians

The showing does not make me good unless I love God the better; and inasmuch as you love God the better, it is more to you than to me.

I do not say this to those who are wise, for they know it well; I say it to you who are simple, for your ease and comfort, for we are all one in love. For truly it was not shown to me because God loves me better than the least soul that is in grace. I am sure there are many who never had a showing or a sight, only the common teaching of Holy Church, who love God better than I do. For if I look at myself alone, I am nothing at all; but in general, I hope, I am in the oneness of love with all my fellow Christians. For in this oneness stands the life of all mankind that shall be saved; for God is all that is good, as I see it.

And God has made all that is made, and God loves all that He has made; and he who loves all his fellow Christians, in general, for God, loves all that is.

For in mankind that shall be saved, everything is included: that is to say, all that is made, and the Maker of all. For in man is God, and in God is everything; and he who loves in this way loves everything.

And I hope, by the grace of God, that whoever sees it this way will be truly taught and mightily comforted, if he needs comfort. I speak of those who shall be saved, for at this time God showed me no others.

But in all things I believe as Holy Church preaches and teaches. For the faith of Holy Church, which I had understood beforehand and which, I hope by the grace of God, I will keep wholly in use and practice, stood continually in my sight; and I wanted and intended never to accept anything that might be contrary to it. With this intent and this meaning I looked at the showing with all my diligence; for in all this blessed showing I looked at it as God meant it.

All this was shown in three ways: by bodily sight, and by words formed in my understanding, and by spiritual sight. But the spiritual sight I cannot and may not show as openly or as fully as I would like. Yet I trust in our Lord God almighty that He will, of His goodness and for love of you, make you take it more spiritually and more sweetly than I can or may tell it.

Chapter 10: The Face on the Crucifix

And after this I saw with bodily sight, in the face of the crucifix that hung before me, which I was gazing at continually, a part of His Passion: contempt, spitting, defiling and buffeting, and many languishing pains, more than I can tell, and often changing of color. And one time I saw how half the face, beginning at the ear, was overspread with dry blood, until it covered it to the middle of the face; and after that the other half was covered in the same way. And meanwhile, in the first part, it vanished just as it had come.

This I saw bodily, but troubled and dim; and I wanted more bodily light, to have seen more clearly. And I was answered in my reason, "If God wants to show you more, He will be your light; you need none but Him."

For I saw Him and sought Him; for we are now so blind and so unwise that we can never seek God until the time when He, of His goodness, shows Himself to us. And when we see anything of Him by grace, then we are stirred by the same grace to seek, with great desire, to see Him more blissfully. And so I saw Him and sought Him, and I had Him and lacked Him; and this is, and should be, our common working in this life, as I see it.

One time my understanding was led down to the bottom of the sea, and there I saw hills and green valleys, looking as if they were grown over with moss, with seaweed and gravel. Then I understood this: that if a man or a woman were there under the broad water, and could have sight of God, as God is with a man continually, he would be safe in soul and body and take no harm; and beyond that, he would have more solace and comfort than all this world can or may tell.

For He wants us to believe that we see Him continually, though it seems to us that we see only a little; and in this belief He makes us always gain more grace. For He wants to be seen, and He wants to be sought, and He wants to be waited for, and He wants to be trusted.

This second showing was so low, and so little, and so simple, that my spirits were in great distress as I looked at it, mourning, fearful and longing; for I was sometimes afraid that it was not a showing at all. And then several times our Lord gave me more sight, by which I understood truly that it was a showing.

It was a figure and a likeness of our foul black deeds, which our fair, bright, blessed Lord bore for our sin. It made me think of the holy Vernicle at Rome, the veil on which He printed His own blessed face when He was in His hard Passion, willingly going to His death, and often changing color: the brownness and the blackness, the pitifulness and the leanness.

Many marveled how this image could be, since He printed it with His blessed face, which is the fairest of heaven, the flower of earth and the fruit of the Maiden's womb. How then could this image be so discolored and so far from fairness? I want to say it as I have understood it by the grace of God.

We know in our faith and in our belief, by the teaching and preaching of Holy Church, that the blessed Trinity made mankind in His image and likeness. In the same way we know that when man fell so deep and so wretchedly by sin, there was no other help to restore man except through Him who made man.

And He who made man for love would, by the same love, restore man to the same bliss, and beyond it.

And just as we were made like the Trinity in our first making, our Maker wanted us to be like Jesus Christ our Savior in heaven without end, by the power of our making anew.

Then between these two He was willing, for love and for the honor of man, to make Himself as like man in this mortal life, in our foulness and in our wretchedness, as man could be without guilt. This is what is meant, as was said before: it was the image and the likeness of our foul black deeds, in which our fair, bright, blessed Lord hid His Godhead.

But I dare truly say, and we ought to believe, that there was never so fair a man as He, until the time when His fair color was changed with toil and sorrow, passion and dying.

This is spoken of in the Second Revelation, and in the Eighth, where more is said of the same likeness. And where it speaks of the Vernicle of Rome, it means by its various changes of color that it was sometimes more comforting and lifelike, and sometimes more pitiful and deathlike, as may be seen later. And this vision taught my understanding that the continual seeking of the soul pleases God greatly; for the soul can do no more than seek, suffer and trust.

And this is worked by the Holy Spirit in every soul that has it.

And the clearness of finding comes by special grace, when it is His will. The seeking, with faith, hope and charity, pleases our Lord; and the finding pleases the soul and fills it with joy.

And so I was taught, as I understand it, that seeking is as good as gazing on Him, for as long as He allows the soul to be in labor. It is God's will that we seek our way to the sight of Him; for by that He will show us Himself, of His special grace, when He wills.

And how a soul is to hold itself in gazing on Him, He will teach Himself; and that is most honor to Him and most profit to the soul, and so the soul receives most humility and virtue, with the grace and leading of the Holy Spirit. For when a soul simply gives itself to God in true trust, whether in seeking or in gazing, it is the greatest honor it can do Him, as I see it.

These are two workings that may be seen in this vision: one is seeking, the other is gazing. The seeking is common, something every soul may have with His grace; and it ought to have the discretion and the teaching of Holy Church.

It is God's will that we have three things in our seeking of His gift. The first is that we seek willingly and busily, without sloth, as far as His grace allows, gladly and merrily, without unreasonable heaviness and vain sorrow. The second is that we wait for Him steadfastly, for His love, without grumbling and striving against Him, to our life's end, for it will last only a while. The third is that we trust in Him mightily, with full and true faith; for it is His will that we know that He will appear suddenly and blissfully to all His lovers.

For His working is secret, and He wants to be perceived; and His appearing will be sweet and sudden; and He wants to be trusted, for He is most familiar and courteous. Blessed may He be.

Chapter 11: God in a Point

And after this I saw God in a point, that is to say, in my understanding; and by this sight I saw that He is in all things. I gazed with care, seeing and knowing in that sight that He does all that is done. I marveled at that sight with a soft fear, and thought, "What is sin?" For I saw truly that God does everything, however little it may be. And I saw truly that nothing is done by chance or by accident, but everything by the foreseeing wisdom of God. If it is chance or accident in the sight of man, our blindness and our lack of foresight is the cause. For the things that are in the foreseeing wisdom of God from before all beginning, which He rightly and honorably and continually leads to the best end, fall upon us suddenly as they come about, without our knowing; and so, by our blindness and our lack of foresight, we say these things happen by chance and accident.

This is how I understand it in this showing of love; for I know well that in the sight of our Lord God there is no chance and no accident. And so I had no choice but to grant that all things that are done are well done, for our Lord God does all. For at this time the working of creatures was not shown, but the working of our Lord God in the creatures; for He is in the midpoint of all things, and He does all. And I am sure that He does no sin.

And here I saw truly that sin is no deed, for in all this sin was not shown. And I did not want to marvel at this any longer, but looked at our Lord to see what He would show.

And so, as far as it could be for that time, the rightfulness of God's working was shown to the soul.

Rightfulness has two fair properties: it is right, and it is full. And so are all the works of our Lord; and they need neither the working of mercy nor of grace, for they are all rightful, and nothing at all is lacking in them. But at another time He gave a showing for the contemplation of sin laid bare, as I shall tell, where He uses the working of mercy and of grace. And this vision was shown to my understanding because our Lord wants the soul to be turned truly to gazing on Him, and on all His works in general, for they are wholly good. And all His judgments are easy and sweet, and bring to great ease the soul that is turned from gazing on the blind judging of man to the fair, sweet judging of our Lord God. For a man holds some deeds well done and some deeds evil, and our Lord does not see them so; for just as all that has being in nature is of God's making, so everything that is done is, in its property, of God's doing. For it is easy to understand that the best deed is well done; and as well as the best and highest deed is done, so well is the least deed done, and all in the property and in the order to which our Lord has ordained it from before all beginning. For there is no doer but He.

I saw most truly that He never changed His purpose in any kind of thing, and never shall, without end; for there was nothing unknown to Him in His rightful ordinance from before all beginning. And therefore all things were set in order before anything was made, as they should stand without end; and no kind of thing shall fail of that point, for He has made all things in the fullness of goodness.

And therefore the blessed Trinity is always fully pleased in all His works. And He showed all this most blessedly, meaning this: "See, I am God. See, I am in all things. See, I do all things. See, I never lift my hands from my works, and never shall, without end. See, I lead all things to the end that I ordain them to from before all beginning, by the same might, wisdom and love with which I made them. How should anything be amiss?" Thus mightily, wisely and lovingly was the soul examined in this vision. Then I saw truly that I had no choice but to assent, with great reverence and joy in God.

Chapter 12: The Scourging

And after this, as I looked, I saw the body bleeding plentifully, as if from the scourging, like this: the fair skin was broken very deep into the tender flesh with sharp blows all over the sweet body. The hot blood ran out so plentifully that neither skin nor wound could be seen, but it was as if it were all blood. And when it came to where it should have fallen down, there it vanished. Nevertheless the bleeding went on for a while, until it could be seen with care. And this was so plentiful, as I saw it, that it seemed to me that if it had been so in nature and in substance at that time, it would have soaked the bed in blood and run over all around it.

Then it came to my mind that God has made plentiful waters on earth for our service and for our bodily ease, for the tender love He has for us. But it pleases Him better that we take His blessed blood, for our full health, to wash us from sin; for there is no liquid that is made that He likes so well to give us. For it is most plentiful, as it is most precious, and that by the power of the blessed Godhead; and it is of our own nature, and blissfully overflows us by the power of His precious love. The most dear blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, just as truly as it is most precious, just as truly is it most plentiful. Look and see the power of this precious plenty of His most dear blood. It went down into hell and broke its bonds and set free all who were there who belong to the court of heaven. The precious plenty of His most dear blood overflows all the earth, and is ready to wash from sin all creatures who are of good will, who have been, or who shall be. The precious plenty of His most dear blood rises up into heaven in the blessed body of our Lord Jesus Christ, and there it is in Him, bleeding, praying for us to the Father, and is and shall be as long as we need it. And it flows forever through all heaven, rejoicing in the salvation of all mankind who are there and who shall be, filling up the number that is still lacking.

Chapter 13: The Fiend Overcome

And afterward, before God showed any words, He allowed me to look at Him for a fitting time, and at all that I had seen, and all the understanding that was in it, as far as the simplicity of the soul could take it.

Then, without voice and without opening of lips, He formed these words in my soul: "With this the fiend is overcome." Our Lord said this word meaning His blessed Passion, as He had shown it before. In this our Lord showed a part of the fiend's malice, and the whole of his powerlessness; for He showed that His Passion is the overcoming of the fiend. God showed that the fiend has the same malice now that he had before the Incarnation; and he toils just as hard, and just as continually he sees that all the souls of salvation escape him, honorably, by the power of His precious Passion. And that is his sorrow, and he is most wretchedly ashamed; for everything God allows him to do turns to joy for us, and to shame and pain for him. And he has as much sorrow when God gives him leave to work as when he does not work; and that is because he can never do as much evil as he would like, for his might is all locked in God's hand. But in God there can be no wrath, as I see it. For our good Lord, having regard without end to His own honor and to the profit of all those who shall be saved, with might and right withstands the damned, who out of malice and wickedness busy themselves to oppose God's will and act against it.

Also I saw our Lord scorn his malice and set his powerlessness at nothing, and He wants us to do the same. At this sight I laughed mightily, and that made those who were around me laugh, and their laughing was a delight to me. I thought that I wished all my fellow Christians had seen what I saw; then they would all have laughed with me. But I did not see Christ laugh. Yet I know well that the sight He showed me made me laugh; for I understood that we may laugh, to comfort ourselves and to rejoice in God, because the fiend is overcome. And when I saw Him scorn his malice, it was by a gazing of my understanding into our Lord; that is to say, it was an inward showing of truth, without any change of face. For, as I see it, it is an honorable property in God, and a lasting one.

And after this I grew serious, and said, "I see three things: game, scorn and earnest. I see game, in that the fiend is overcome; and I see scorn, in that God scorns him, and he shall be scorned; and I see earnest, in that he is overcome by the blessed Passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was done in great earnest and with grievous labor." And when I said that he is scorned, I meant that God scorns him, that is to say, because He sees him now as He shall without end; for in this God showed that the fiend is damned. And this is what I meant when I said he shall be scorned: for I saw that he shall be scorned on Judgment Day by all who shall be saved, whose salvation he has greatly envied. For then he shall see that all the woe and tribulation he has done them shall be turned into an increase of their joy without end; and all the pain and sorrow that he would have brought them to shall go with him to hell forever.

Chapter 14: The Lord's Thanks

And after this our Lord said, "I thank you for your service, and for your labor in your youth." And in this my understanding was lifted up into heaven, where I saw our Lord God as a lord in his own house, a lord who has called all his most dear friends to a solemn feast. Then I saw that the Lord took no place of His own in His own house; but I saw Him reign royally in His house, filling it all with joy and mirth, Himself gladdening and comforting His most dear friends without end, most familiarly and most courteously, with marvelous melody, in endless love, in His own fair and blessed face; and that glorious face of the Godhead fills all heaven with joy and bliss.

God showed three degrees of bliss that every soul shall have in heaven that has willingly served God in any degree on earth. The first is the honor and thanks that he shall receive from our Lord God when he is delivered from pain. This thanks is so high and so honorable that it seems to him that it fills him, even if there were nothing more; for it seemed to me that all the pain and labor that all living men could suffer could not have deserved the honoring thanks that one man shall have who has willingly served God. The second is that all the blessed creatures in heaven shall see that honoring thanks, and He makes his service known to all who are in heaven. And at this time this example was shown: if a king thanks his subjects, it is a great honor to them; and if he makes it known to all the realm, then their honor is much increased. And the third is that it shall last without end as new and as delightful as it is when it is first received.

And I saw that this was shown familiarly and sweetly: that the age of every man shall be known in heaven, and he shall be rewarded for his willing service and for his time; and above all, the age of those who willingly and freely offer their youth to God is rewarded beyond measure and wonderfully thanked. For I saw that whenever a man or woman is truly turned to God, for one day's service and for his endless will he shall have all these three degrees of bliss. And the more the loving soul sees this courtesy of God, the gladder it is to serve Him all its life.

Chapter 15: Weal and Woe

And after this He gave my soul a sovereign spiritual delight. In this delight I was filled with everlasting sureness, mightily made fast, without any painful fear. This feeling was so glad and so spiritual that I was wholly at peace, at ease and at rest, so that there was nothing on earth that could have grieved me. This lasted only a while, and then I was turned and left to myself in heaviness and weariness of my life and disgust with myself, so that I could scarcely have the patience to live. There was no comfort and nothing to ease my feeling but faith, hope and charity; and these I had in truth, but very little in feeling.

And soon after this our blessed Lord gave me again the comfort and the rest in soul, delight and sureness, so blissfully and so mightily that no fear, no sorrow, no pain of body or of spirit that could be suffered would have distressed me. And then the pain showed itself again to my feeling, and then the joy and the delight, now the one and now the other, many times; I suppose about twenty times. And in the time of joy I might have said with Saint Paul, "Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ"; and in the pain I might have said with Saint Peter, "Lord, save me, I am perishing."

This vision was shown to teach me, as I understand it, that it is profitable for some souls to feel in this way: sometimes to be in comfort, and sometimes to fail and be left to themselves. God wants us to know that He keeps us equally safe in woe and in weal. And for the profit of a man's soul, a man is sometimes left to himself, although his sin is not always the cause; for at this time I had not sinned in any way for which I should have been left to myself, for it was so sudden. Nor did I deserve to have this blessed feeling; but our Lord gives it freely when He wills, and sometimes allows us to be in woe, and both are one love. For it is God's will that we hold ourselves in comfort with all our might; for bliss lasts without end, and pain passes and shall be brought to nothing for those who shall be saved. Therefore it is not God's will that we follow the feelings of pain in sorrow and mourning over them, but that we pass over them at once and hold ourselves in the endless delight that is God.

Chapter 16: The Drying of the Body

After this Christ showed a part of His Passion near His dying. I saw the sweet face as if it were dry and bloodless, with the pallor of dying, and then a deader pallor, languishing, and then turning deader still into blue, and afterward into brownish blue, as the flesh turned more deeply dead. For His Passion showed itself to me most of all in His blessed face, and above all in His lips; there I saw these four colors, in lips that before had been fresh and ruddy, lively and lovely to my sight. This was a pitiful change, to see this deep dying; and also the moisture clotting together and drying, as I saw it. And the sweet body grew brown and black, all changed and turned out of the fair, fresh and lively color of itself into dry dying. For at the same time that our blessed Savior died on the cross there was a dry, sharp wind, wondrously cold, as I saw it; and when all the precious blood that could pass out of the sweet body had bled out of it, there was still a moisture in the sweet flesh of Christ, as it was shown. Loss of blood and pain drying it from within, and the blowing of the wind and the cold coming from without, met together in the sweet body of Christ; and these four dried the flesh of Christ in the course of time. And though this pain was bitter and sharp, it was very long lasting, as I saw it. And the pain dried up all the living spirits of Christ's flesh. In this way I saw the sweet flesh dry before my eyes, part after part drying, with marvelous pain; and as long as any spirit had life in Christ's flesh, so long He suffered. This long pain seemed to me as if He had been a week dead, dying, at the very point of passing out of life, always suffering the great pain. And where I said it seemed as if He had been a week dead, it means that the sweet body was so discolored, so dry, so shrunken, so deathly and so pitiful, as if He had been a week dead and dying all the while. And it seemed to me that the drying of Christ's flesh was the greatest pain of His Passion, and the last.

Chapter 17: I Thirst

And in this drying the word Christ said was brought to my mind: "I thirst." For I saw in Christ a double thirst, one bodily and the other spiritual. This word was shown for the bodily thirst; and the spiritual thirst was shown as I shall tell afterward. And I understood by the bodily thirst that the body suffered for want of moisture, for the blessed flesh and bones were left all alone, without blood and moisture. The blessed body dried all alone for a long time, with the wrenching of the nails and the weight of the body. For I understood that because of the tenderness of the sweet hands and the sweet feet, and the great hardness and grievousness of the nails, the wounds grew wide, and the body sagged with its own weight from hanging so long; and there was the piercing and tearing of the head, and the binding of the crown, all baked with dry blood, with the sweet hair gluing the dry flesh to the thorns, and the thorns to the drying flesh. And in the beginning, while the flesh was fresh and bleeding, the continual pressing of the thorns made the wounds wide. And furthermore I saw that the sweet skin and the tender flesh, with the hair and with the blood, were all torn and loosened round about by the thorns and broken in many pieces, and were hanging as if they would soon have fallen off, while they still had their natural moisture. How it was done I did not see; but I understood that it was with the sharp thorns, and the rough and grievous setting on of the garland, unsparing and without pity, which broke the sweet skin and the flesh all to pieces, and with the hair loosened it from the bone; so that it was broken in pieces like a cloth, and sagging downward, as if it would soon have fallen for heaviness and looseness. And that was great sorrow and fear to me, for it seemed to me that I would not for my life have seen it fall.

This continued a while, and afterward it began to change; and I looked and marveled how it could be. And then I saw that it was because it began to dry, and to lose a part of the weight that was round about the garland. And so it was encircled all around, as if it were garland upon garland: the garland of thorns was dyed with the garland of blood, and that other garland and the head were all one color, like clotted blood when it is dried. The skin and the flesh that showed, of the face and of the body, were finely wrinkled, with a tawny color like a dry board when it is old, and the face browner than the body. I saw four kinds of drying. The first was the loss of blood; the second, the pain that followed after; the third, that He was hanging up in the air, as men hang a cloth to dry; the fourth, that His bodily nature asked for liquid, and no kind of comfort was given Him. Ah, hard and grievous was that pain, but much harder and more grievous it was when the moisture failed and everything began to dry, shriveling in this way. These were two pains that showed in the blessed head: the first worked toward the drying while it was moist; and the other was slow, with shriveling and drying, and with the blowing of the wind from without, which dried Him more and pained Him with cold, more than my heart can think, and all the other pains too; and for these pains I saw that everything I can say is too little, for it cannot be told. The showing of Christ's pains filled me full of pains; for I knew well that He suffered only once, but it was as if He wanted to show it to me and fill me with the memory of it, as I had asked before. And in all this time of Christ's presence I felt no pain except for Christ's pains.

Then I thought that I had known very little what pain it was that I asked for, and like a wretch I repented, thinking that if I had known what it would be, I would have been loath to pray for it; for it seemed to me that my pains went beyond any bodily death. I thought, "Is any pain in hell like this?" And I was answered in my reason, "Hell is another pain, for there is despair there. But of all pains that lead to salvation, this is the greatest: to see your Lover suffer." How could any pain be greater than to see Him who is all my life, all my bliss and all my joy suffer? Here I felt steadfastly that I loved Christ so much more than myself that there was no pain that could be suffered like the sorrow I had to see Him in pain.

Chapter 18: Our Lady's Compassion

Here I saw in part the compassion of our blessed Lady, Saint Mary, for Christ. And she was so made one with Him in love that the greatness of her love was the cause of the greatness of her pain. For in this I saw a substance of natural love, continued by grace, that His creatures have for Him; and this natural love was shown most fully in His sweet Mother, and beyond all others. For as much as she loved Him more than all others, so far her pain went beyond all others'. For always, the higher, the mightier and the sweeter the love is, the more sorrow it is to the lover to see the body he loves in pain. And so all His disciples and all His true lovers suffered more pain than their own bodily dying would have given them; for I am sure by my own feeling that the least of them loved Him so far above himself that it is more than I can say.

Here I saw a great union between Christ and us, as I understand it; for when He was in pain, we were in pain, and all creatures that could suffer pain suffered with Him: that is to say, all the creatures God has made for our service. The sky and the earth failed for sorrow, each in its nature, at the time of Christ's dying; for it belongs to their property by nature to know Him for their Lord, in whom all their power stands. And when His life failed, they had no choice, by the kinship of nature, but to fail with Him as far as they could, for sorrow at His pains. And so those who were His friends suffered pain for love. And all in general did too, that is to say, those who did not know Him suffered for the failing of every kind of comfort, except the mighty secret keeping of God. I mean two kinds of people who did not know Him, as may be understood by two persons. One was Pilate; the other was Saint Denis of France, who was at that time a pagan. For when he saw the wonders and marvels, the sorrows and terrors that happened at that time, he said, "Either the world is now at an end, or else He who is the Maker of nature is suffering." And so he wrote on an altar, "This is an altar of the unknown God." God, who of His goodness makes the planets and the elements work by their nature for the blessed man and for the cursed alike, at that time withdrew that working from both; and that was why those who did not know Him were in sorrow at that time. In this way our Lord Jesus was pained for us, and we all stand in this kind of pain with Him, and shall do so until we come to His bliss, as I shall tell afterward.

Chapter 19: Jesus for My Heaven

At this time I wanted to look away from the cross, and I did not dare; for I knew well that while I was gazing on the cross I was secure and safe. Therefore I would not consent to put my soul in peril, for away from the cross there was no safety, for fear of fiends. Then a suggestion came to me in my reason, as if it had been said to me in friendship, "Look up to heaven, to His Father." And then I saw well, with the faith that I felt, that there was nothing between the cross and heaven that could have harmed me. Here I had either to look up or else to answer. I answered inwardly, with all the might of my soul, and said, "No, I cannot, for You are my heaven." I said this because I did not want to; for I would rather have been in that pain until Judgment Day than have come to heaven any other way than by Him. For I knew well that He who bound me so tightly would unbind me when He wished. In this way I was taught to choose Jesus for my heaven, whom I saw only in pain at that time. I wanted no other heaven than Jesus, who shall be my bliss when I come there. And this has always been a comfort to me, that by His grace I chose Jesus to be my heaven in all this time of passion and sorrow; and that has taught me that I should always do so, and choose Jesus alone for my heaven, in weal and in woe.

And though I, like a wretch, had repented, as I said before, that if I had known what pain it would be I would have been loath to pray for it, here I saw truly that it was the reluctance and frailty of the flesh, without the consent of the soul, to which God assigns no blame. Repenting and willing choice are two contraries, and I felt them both at that time. And these are two parts of us, one outward and the other inward. The outward part is our mortal flesh, which is now in pain and now in woe, and shall be in this life; and I felt much of it at this time, and it was that part that repented. The inward part is a high and blissful life, which is all in peace and love; and this is felt more secretly; and it is in this part that I mightily, wisely and willingly chose Jesus for my heaven. And in this I saw truly that the inward part is master and sovereign over the outward, neither caring about nor taking heed of what the outward wants; but all its intention and its will are set without end on being made one with our Lord Jesus. That the outward part should draw the inward part to consent was not shown to me; but that the inward part draws the outward part by grace, and that both shall be made one in bliss without end by the power of Christ: this was shown.

Chapter 20: How Much He Suffered

And so I saw our Lord Jesus languishing for a long time; for the union with the Godhead gave strength to the manhood, for love, to suffer more than all men could. I mean not only that He suffered more pain than all men could suffer, but also that He suffered more pain than all the men of salvation who ever were, from the first beginning to the last day, could tell or fully think, having regard to the worthiness of the highest and most honored King, and to the shameful, contemptuous and painful death. For He who is highest and worthiest was most foully condemned and most utterly despised. For the highest point in His Passion is to think and to know that it is God who suffered. After that come these two other points, which are lower: one is what He suffered, and the other is for whom He suffered.

And in this He brought to my mind in part the height and the nobility of the glorious Godhead, and with it the preciousness and the tenderness of the blessed body, which are made one together; and also how loath our nature is to suffer pain. For just as He was most tender and pure, so He was most strong and mighty to suffer. And He suffered for the sin of every man who shall be saved; and He saw every man's sorrow, desolation and anguish, and sorrowed for kinship and for love. For as much as our Lady sorrowed for His pains, so much He suffered sorrow for her sorrows, and more, inasmuch as His sweet manhood was worthier in nature. For as long as He could suffer, He suffered for us and sorrowed for us; and now He is risen and can suffer no more, yet He suffers with us, as I shall tell afterward. And as I looked at all this by His grace, I saw that the love He has for our soul was so strong in Him that He chose it willingly, with great desire, and suffered it gently, with great joy. For the soul that He looks on in this way, when it is touched by grace, shall truly see that the pains of Christ's Passion surpass all pains; that is to say, the pains which shall be turned into everlasting joy by the power of Christ's Passion.

Chapter 21: The Change in His Face

It is God's will, as I understand it, that we have three ways of contemplating His blessed Passion. The first is to contemplate the hard pain that He suffered, with contrition and compassion; and our Lord showed that at this time, and gave me strength and grace to see it. And I watched for the moment of His passing with all my strength, and expected to see the body quite dead; but I did not see Him so. And just at the moment when it seemed to me, by every appearance, that the life could last no longer and the showing of the end had to be near, suddenly, as I was looking at the same cross, His face changed to one of bliss. The change in His blessed face changed mine, and I was as glad and merry as it was possible to be. Then our Lord brought merrily to my mind, "Where now is any point of your pain or of your anguish?" And I was very merry.

I understood that in our Lord's meaning we are now on His cross with Him, in our pains and in our passion, dying; and if we willingly stay on the same cross, with His help and His grace, to the last point, suddenly He will change His face toward us, and we shall be with Him in heaven. Between the one and the other it shall all be one moment, and then everything shall be brought into joy. And this is what He meant in this showing: "Where now is any point of your pain or of your grief?" And we shall be full of bliss.

And here I saw truly that if He showed us His blissful face now, there is no pain on earth or in any other place that could trouble us, but everything would be joy and bliss to us. But because He shows us the sorrowful face of His Passion, as He bore His cross in this life, we are in distress and labor with Him, as our nature requires. And the reason He allows it is that He wants, of His goodness, to make us heirs with Him in His bliss. And for this little pain that we suffer here we shall have a high, endless knowing in God, which we could never have without it; and the harder our pains have been with Him on His cross, the greater our honor shall be with Him in His kingdom.

Chapter 22: Are You Well Content?

Then our good Lord spoke, asking, "Are you well pleased that I suffered for you?" I said, "Yes, good Lord, I thank You; yes, good Lord, blessed may You be." Then Jesus, our good Lord, said, "If you are pleased, I am pleased. It is a joy, a bliss, an endless delight to me that ever I suffered the Passion for you; and if I could have suffered more, I would have suffered more."

In this feeling my understanding was lifted up into heaven, and there I saw three heavens. At this sight I marveled greatly, and I thought: though I see three heavens, and all of them in the blessed manhood of Christ, none is more, none is less, none is higher, none is lower, but they are equal in bliss.

For the first heaven Christ showed me His Father, in no bodily likeness, but in His property and in His working; that is to say, I saw in Christ that the Father is. The working of the Father is this: that He gives a reward to His Son Jesus Christ. This gift and this reward is so blissful to Jesus that His Father could have given Him no reward that would have pleased Him better. The first heaven, that is, the pleasing of the Father, was shown to me as a heaven, and it was full of bliss; for He is well pleased with all the deeds that Jesus has done for our salvation. And therefore we are His not only because He bought us, but also, by the courteous gift of His Father, we are His bliss, we are His reward, we are His honor, we are His crown. And this was a singular marvel and a most delightful thing to contemplate: that we are His crown. What I am saying is so great a bliss to Jesus that He sets at nothing His labor, and His Passion, and His cruel and shameful death.

And in these words, "If I could suffer more, I would suffer more," I saw truly that as often as He could die, so often He would, and love would never let Him rest until He had done it. And I looked with great diligence to know how often He would die if He could; and truly the number passed my understanding and my wits so far that my reason could not and was not able to comprehend it, or take it in. And when He had died so often, or was to die, He would still set it at nothing for love; for everything seems little to Him compared with His love. For though the sweet manhood of Christ could suffer only once, the goodness in Him can never cease offering it: every day He is ready to do the same, if it could be. For if He said that He would make new heavens and new earths for love of me, it would be but little in comparison, for He could do this every day if He wanted, without any labor. But to die for love of me so often that the number passes the reason of creatures: this is the highest offer that our Lord God could make to man's soul, as I see it.

Then He means this: "How could it be, then, that I should not do for love of you all that I could, which grieves me not at all, since I would die for love of you so often, with no regard for my hard pains?"

And here I saw the second way of contemplating His blessed Passion: the love that made Him suffer surpasses all His pains as far as heaven is above earth. For the pain was a noble, precious and honorable deed, done once in time by the working of love; and love was without beginning, is, and shall be without end. For this love He said this word most sweetly: "If I could suffer more, I would suffer more." He did not say, "if it were needful to suffer more," but, "If I could suffer more." For though it were not needful, if He could suffer more, He would.

This deed and this work for our salvation was ordained as well as God could ordain it; it was done as honorably as Christ could do it. And in this I saw a full bliss in Christ; for His bliss would not have been full if it could have been done any better than it was done.

Chapter 23: Three Heavens

And in these three words, "It is a joy, a bliss, an endless delight to me," three heavens were shown, like this: by the joy I understood the pleasure of the Father; by the bliss, the honor of the Son; and by the endless delight, the Holy Spirit. The Father is pleased, the Son is honored, and the Holy Spirit delights. And here I saw the third way of contemplating His blissful Passion: that is to say, the joy and the bliss that make Him delight in it. For our courteous Lord showed His Passion to me in five ways. The first is the bleeding of the head; the second, the discoloring of His blessed face; the third is the plentiful bleeding of the body, as if from the scourging; the fourth is the deep drying. These four, as was said before, were for the pains of the Passion. And the fifth is what was shown for the joy and the bliss of the Passion. For it is God's will that we have true delight with Him in our salvation, and in it He wants us to be mightily comforted and strengthened. And this is how He wants our soul to be occupied, merrily, with His grace; for we are His bliss, for in us He delights without end, and so shall we in Him, with His grace. All that He does for us, and has done, and ever shall, was never a cost or a burden to Him, nor could be, except only that He died in our manhood, beginning at the sweet Incarnation and lasting until the blessed rising on Easter morning. That long the cost and the burden of our redemption lasted in deed; and in that deed He rejoices endlessly, as was said before. And Jesus wants us to take heed of this bliss that is in the blessed Trinity over our salvation, and to desire to have as much spiritual delight, with His grace, as was said before; that is to say, that our delight in our salvation be like the joy that Christ has in our salvation, as far as it can be while we are here. All the Trinity worked in the Passion of Christ, ministering abundance of virtue and plenty of grace to us by Him; but only the Maiden's Son suffered, and in this the whole blessed Trinity rejoices. And this was shown in this word: "Are you well pleased?" And by that other word Christ said, "If you are well pleased, I am well pleased," as if He had said, "It is joy and delight enough to me, and I ask nothing else of you for my labor but that I might please you."

And in this He brought to my mind the property of a glad giver. A glad giver always takes little heed of the thing that he gives, but all his desire and all his intent is to please and comfort the one to whom he gives it. And if the receiver takes the gift gladly and thankfully, then the courteous giver sets at nothing all his cost and all his labor, for the joy and delight he has in having pleased and comforted the one he loves. This was shown plentifully and fully. Think wisely, too, of the greatness of this word "ever." For in it was shown a high knowing of the love that He has in our salvation, with the many joys that follow from the Passion of Christ. One is that He rejoices that He has done it in deed, and He shall suffer no more; another is that by it He has bought us from the endless pains of hell; another is that He has brought us up into heaven and made us to be His crown and His endless bliss.

Chapter 24: The Wound in His Side

With a glad face our good Lord looked into His side and gazed on it with joy; and with His sweet looking He led the understanding of His creature in through the same wound into His side. And there He showed a fair and delightful place, large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and in love. And with that He brought to my mind His most precious blood and His precious water, which He let pour out for love. And with the sweet gazing He showed His blessed heart split in two. And with His rejoicing He showed my understanding, in part, the blessed Godhead, as far as He wanted at that time to strengthen the poor soul to understand it, as far as it can be put into words; that is to say, the endless love that was without beginning, and is, and shall be forever.

And with this our good Lord said, most blissfully, "Look how I loved you," as if He had said, "My darling, look and see your Lord, your God, who is your Maker and your endless joy. See your own brother, your Savior. My child, look and see what delight and bliss I have in your salvation; and for my love rejoice with me."

And also, for more understanding, this blessed word was said: "Look how I loved you," as if He had said, "Look and see that I loved you so much, before I died for you, that I was willing to die for you. And now I have died for you, and suffered willingly what I could; and now all my bitter pain and all my hard labor is turned into everlasting joy and bliss for me and for you. How could it now be that you should pray to me for anything that pleases me, and I should not most gladly grant it to you? For my delight is your holiness, and your endless joy and bliss with me."

This is the understanding, as simply as I can say it, of this blessed word, "Look how I loved you." Our good Lord showed this to make us glad and merry.

Chapter 25: Would You See Her?

And with this same face of mirth and joy our good Lord looked down on His right side, and brought to my mind where our Lady stood at the time of His Passion, and said, "Would you see her?" And in this sweet word it was as if He had said, "I know well that you would see my blessed Mother; for after myself she is the highest joy that I could show you, and the greatest delight and honor to me, and she is the one most desired to be seen by all my blessed creatures." And for the marvelous, high and singular love that He has for this sweet maiden, His blessed Mother, our Lady Saint Mary, He shows her bliss and joy, as by the meaning of this sweet word, as if He said, "Would you see how I love her, so that you might rejoice with me in the love I have for her and she for me?"

And also, for more understanding, our good Lord speaks this sweet word in love to all mankind that shall be saved, as if to one person, as if He said, "Would you see in her how you are loved? For love of you I have made her so high, so noble, so worthy; and this pleases me, and I want it to please you too." For after Himself she is the most blissful sight. But I am not taught by this to long to see her bodily presence while I am here, but the virtues of her blessed soul, her truth, her wisdom, her charity, by which I am taught to know myself and reverently to dread my God.

And when our good Lord had shown this, and said this word, "Would you see her?" I answered and said, "Yes, good Lord, I thank You; yes, good Lord, if it is Your will." I prayed this often, and I expected to see her in bodily likeness, but I did not see her so. And in that word Jesus showed me a spiritual sight of her. Just as I had seen her before, little and simple, so He showed her then, high and noble and glorious, and pleasing to Him above all creatures. And He wants it to be known that all those who delight in Him should also delight in her.

And for more understanding He showed this example: if a man loves one creature singularly above all creatures, he will make all other creatures love and delight in that creature he loves so much. And in this word that Jesus said, "Would you see her?" it seemed to me that it was the most delightful word He could give me of her, together with the spiritual showing He gave me of her. For our Lord showed me nothing in particular except our Lady Saint Mary, and He showed her three times. The first was as she conceived; the second as she was in her sorrow under the cross; and the third as she is now, in delight, honor and joy.

Chapter 26: I Am He

And after this our Lord showed Himself more glorified, as I see it, than I had seen Him before; and in this I was taught that our soul shall never have rest until it comes into Him, knowing that He is full of joy, familiar and courteous, and blissful, and very life. Again and again our Lord Jesus said, "I am He, I am He, I am He who is highest; I am He whom you love; I am He in whom you delight; I am He whom you serve; I am He for whom you long; I am He whom you desire; I am He whom you mean; I am He who is all; I am He whom Holy Church preaches to you and teaches you; I am He who showed myself to you before." The number of the words passes my wits and my understanding and all my powers; for they were of the highest, as I see it, for in them is contained I cannot tell what. But the joy that I saw in the showing of them passes all that heart can think or soul can desire. And therefore these words are not explained here; but let every man, according to the grace that God gives him in understanding and longing, receive them in our Lord's meaning.

Chapter 27: Sin Is Behovely

And after this our Lord brought to my mind the longing that I had for Him before; and I saw that nothing hindered me but sin. And I looked at this in all of us in general, and it seemed to me that if there had been no sin, we should all have been clean and like our Lord, as He made us. And so in my folly, before this time, I had often wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not hindered; for then, I thought, all would have been well. This impulse was much to be avoided; and nevertheless I mourned and sorrowed over it, without reason and discretion. But Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that I needed, answered with this word and said, "Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."⁴

In this naked word "sin" our Lord brought to my mind, in general, all that is not good: the shameful contempt and the utmost tribulation that He bore for us in this life, and His dying, and all His pains and passion, bodily and spiritual, and the pains of all His creatures, spiritual and bodily. For we are all troubled in part, and we shall be troubled, following our master Jesus, until we are fully purged of our mortal flesh and of all our inward affections that are not truly good. And with this came the sight of all the pains that ever were or ever shall be; and in all of it I understood the Passion of Christ as the greatest pain, surpassing every other. And all this was shown in a touch, and passed quickly over into comfort; for our good Lord did not want the soul to be afraid of this ugly sight.

But I did not see sin; for I believe it has no kind of substance and no part of being, and it could not be known except by the pain it causes. And this pain is something, as I see it, for a time; for it purges us and makes us know ourselves and ask for mercy. For the Passion of our Lord is comfort to us against all this, and so is His blessed will. And for the tender love that our good Lord has for all who shall be saved, He comforts readily and sweetly, meaning this: "It is true that sin is the cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

These words were shown most tenderly, showing no kind of blame to me or to anyone who shall be saved. Then it would be most unnatural of me to blame God or wonder at Him for my sin, since He does not blame me for sin. And in these same words I saw a high and marvelous secret hidden in God, a secret that He shall make open, and it shall be known to us in heaven. In that knowing we shall truly see the reason why He allowed sin to come; and in that sight we shall have joy without end.

Chapter 28: Compassion for Our Fellow Christians

In this way I saw how Christ has compassion on us because of sin. And just as I was filled before, in the Passion of Christ, with pain and compassion, so in this I was filled in part with compassion for all my fellow Christians; for He loves most dearly the people who shall be saved. That is to say, God's servants, Holy Church, shall be shaken in sorrow and anguish and tribulation in this world, as men shake a cloth in the wind. And to this our Lord answered, showing it in this way: "Ah, I shall make a great thing of this in heaven, of endless honor and everlasting joy."

Yes, I saw this much: that our Lord rejoices in the tribulation of His servants, with pity and compassion. And on each person whom He loves, to bring him to His bliss, He lays something that is no fault in His sight, by which they are brought low and despised in this world, scorned and mocked and cast out. And He does this to hinder the harm they would take from the pomp and the pride and the vainglory of this wretched life, and to make their way ready to come to heaven, in bliss without end, everlasting. For He says, "I shall break you utterly of your vain affections and your vicious pride, and after that I shall gather you together, and make you humble and mild, clean and holy, by making you one with me."

And then I saw that every natural compassion that a man has for his fellow Christian, with charity, is Christ in him; and that every kind of being brought to nothing that was shown in His Passion was shown again here in this compassion. In this there were two kinds of understanding in our Lord's meaning. One was the bliss that we are brought to, in which He wants us to rejoice. The other is for comfort in our pain: for He wants us to know that all of it shall be turned to our honor and profit by the power of His Passion; and to know that we have not suffered at all alone, but with Him, and to see Him as our ground; and to see that His pains and His tribulation surpass all that we can suffer so far that it cannot be fully thought. And contemplating this well will save us from grumbling and despair when we feel our pains. And if we see truly that our sin deserves it, still His love excuses us, and of His great courtesy He does away with all our blame, and looks on us with pity and compassion, as children, innocent and not to be loathed.

Chapter 29: How Can All Be Well?

But in this I stood contemplating things in general, troubled and mourning, saying this to our Lord in my meaning, with very great dread: "Ah, good Lord, how could all be well, for the great harm that is to come to Your creatures by sin?" And here I wanted, as far as I dared, to have some more open explanation, by which I might be eased in this. And to this our blessed Lord answered most humbly, and with a most lovely face, and showed that Adam's sin was the greatest harm that ever was done, or ever shall be, until the world's end; and He also showed that this is openly known in all Holy Church on earth. Furthermore, He taught me that I should contemplate the glorious amends; for this making of amends is more pleasing to the blessed Godhead, and more honorable for man's salvation, beyond all comparison, than ever the sin of Adam was harmful. Then our blessed Lord means this, and in this teaching He wants us to take heed of it: "For since I have made well the greatest harm, it is my will that you know by this that I shall make well all that is less."

Chapter 30: What Is Open and What Is Hidden

He gave me understanding of two parts. One part is our Savior and our salvation. This blessed part is open, clear, fair and light, and plentiful; for all mankind that is of good will, and that shall be, is contained in this part. To this we are bound by God, and drawn and counseled and taught, inwardly by the Holy Spirit and outwardly by Holy Church, in the same grace. In this our Lord wants us to be occupied, rejoicing in Him, for He rejoices in us; and the more plentifully we take of this, with reverence and humility, the more thanks we deserve from Him, and the more profit we gain for ourselves. And in this way we may see, and rejoice, that our part is our Lord. The other part is hidden and shut away from us; that is to say, all that is beside our salvation. For that is our Lord's secret counsel, and it belongs to the royal lordship of God to keep His secret counsels in peace; and it belongs to His servants, for obedience and reverence, not to want to know His counsels. Our Lord has pity and compassion on us because some creatures make themselves so busy about it; and I am sure that if we knew how greatly we should please Him, and ease ourselves, by leaving it alone, we would. The saints in heaven want to know nothing but what our Lord wants to show them; and their charity and their desire are ruled by the will of our Lord. And so ought we to will, so that our will is like theirs; then we shall will and desire nothing but the will of our Lord, as they do, for we are all one in God's meaning. And here I was taught that I should rejoice only in our blessed Savior Jesus, and trust in Him for all things.

Chapter 31: I Will Make All Things Well

And so our good Lord answered all the questions and doubts that I could raise, saying most comfortingly, "I may make all things well, and I can make all things well, and I shall make all things well, and I will make all things well; and you shall see for yourself that all manner of thing shall be well." Where He says "I may," I understand it of the Father; and where He says "I can," I understand it of the Son; and where He says "I will," I understand it of the Holy Spirit; and where He says "I shall," I understand the unity of the blessed Trinity, three Persons and one truth; and where He says "You shall see for yourself," I understand the coming of all mankind that shall be saved into the blessed Trinity. And in these five words God wants us to be enclosed in rest and peace. And in this way the spiritual thirst of Christ shall have an end. For this is the spiritual thirst of Christ: the love-longing that lasts, and always shall, until we see that sight on Judgment Day. For we who shall be saved, and shall be Christ's joy and His bliss, some are still here, and some are yet to come, and so some shall be until that day. Therefore this is His thirst, and His love-longing for us all together, here in Him, to our endless bliss, as I see it; for we are not now as fully whole in Him as we shall be then. For we know in our faith, and it was also shown in all the showings, that Christ Jesus was both God and man. As for the Godhead, He is Himself the highest bliss, and was from before all beginning, and shall be without end; and this true and endless bliss can never be raised or lowered in itself. And this was plentifully seen in every showing, and especially in the Twelfth, where He says, "I am He who is highest." And as for Christ's manhood, it is known in our faith, and was also shown, that He, by the power of the Godhead, for love, to bring us to His bliss, suffered pains and passion, and died.

And these are the works of Christ's manhood, in which He rejoices; and He showed that in the Ninth, where He says, "It is a joy, a bliss, an endless delight to me that ever I suffered the Passion for you." And this is the bliss of Christ's works; and this is what He means where He says in the same showing, "We are His bliss, we are His reward, we are His honor, we are His crown." For as regards Christ as our head, He is glorified and beyond suffering; but as regards His body, in which all His members are knit together, He is not yet fully glorified, nor wholly beyond suffering. For the same thirst and longing that He had on the cross, which desire, longing and thirst, as I see it, was in Him from before all beginning, He has still, and shall have until the time when the last soul that shall be saved has come up to His bliss. For as truly as there is a property in God of compassion and pity, just as truly there is a property in God of thirst and longing; and by the power of this longing in Christ we are to long for Him in return, and without that no soul comes to heaven. And this property of longing and thirst comes from the endless goodness of God, just as the property of pity comes from His endless goodness; and though He has both longing and pity, they are distinct properties, as I see it. And in this stands the point of the spiritual thirst, which lasts in Him as long as we are in need, drawing us up to His bliss. And all this was seen in the showing of compassion, for that shall cease on Judgment Day. In this way He has pity and compassion on us, and He has longing to have us; but His wisdom and His love do not allow it to come until the best time.

Chapter 32: The Great Deed of the Last Day

One time our good Lord said, "All manner of thing shall be well"; and another time He said, "You shall see for yourself that all manner of thing shall be well." And from these two the soul took different kinds of understanding.

One was this: that He wants us to know that He takes heed not only of noble things and great ones, but also of little and small ones, of low and simple ones, of this one and that one. And this is what He means when He says, "All manner of thing shall be well"; for He wants us to know that the least thing shall not be forgotten.

Another understanding is this: that many deeds are done evilly in our sight, and such great harms are taken, that it seems to us it would be impossible for them ever to come to a good end. And we look at this, and sorrow and mourn over it, so that we cannot rest in the blissful contemplation of God as we should. And the reason is this: that the use of our reason is now so blind, so low and so simple that we cannot know the high, marvelous wisdom, the might and the goodness of the blessed Trinity. And this is what He means where He says, "You shall see for yourself that all manner of thing shall be well," as if He said, "Take it now in faith and in trust, and at the very end you shall truly be in the fullness of joy."

And so in the same five words spoken before, "I may make all things well," I understand a mighty comfort concerning all the works of our Lord God that are still to come. There is a deed which the blessed Trinity shall do on the last day, as I see it; and what the deed shall be, and how it shall be done, is unknown to all creatures beneath Christ, and shall be until it is done. The goodness and the love of our Lord God want us to know that it shall be; and His might and His wisdom, by the same love, want to cover it and hide it from us, what it shall be and how it shall be done. And the reason He wants us to know it in this way is that He wants us to be more at ease in our soul and at peace in love, leaving off the contemplation of all the storms that could hinder us from truly rejoicing in Him. This is the great deed ordained by our Lord God from before all beginning, treasured and hidden in His blessed breast, known only to Himself, by which deed He shall make all things well. For just as the blessed Trinity made all things out of nothing, so the same blessed Trinity shall make well all that is not well.

And at this sight I marveled greatly, and looked at our faith, thinking this: our faith is grounded in God's word, and it belongs to our faith that we believe that God's word shall be kept in all things. And one point of our faith is that many creatures shall be damned: the angels who fell out of heaven for pride, who are now fiends; and many on earth who die outside the faith of Holy Church, that is to say, those who are heathen; and also many who have received baptism and live an unchristian life, and so die outside charity. All these shall be damned to hell without end, as Holy Church teaches me to believe. And with all this standing, it seemed to me impossible that all manner of thing should be well, as our Lord showed at this time. And to this I had no other answer in the showing of our Lord but this: "What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things, and I shall make all things well."

And in this I was taught by the grace of God that I should hold myself steadfastly in the faith as I had understood it before; and with that, that I should stand firm and believe in earnest that all manner of thing shall be well, as our Lord showed at that same time. For this is the great deed that our Lord God shall do, in which He shall keep His word in all things, and He shall make well all that is not well. But what the deed shall be, and how it shall be done, there is no creature beneath Christ who knows it, or shall know it until it is done, as far as I understood our Lord's meaning at this time.

Chapter 33: Hell and Purgatory

And yet in this I wanted, as far as I dared, to have some sight of hell and of purgatory. But it was not my meaning to put to the test anything that belongs to our faith, for I truly believed that hell and purgatory are for the same end that Holy Church teaches. My meaning was that I might see, for my learning, everything that belongs to my faith, so that I might live the more to God's honor and to my own profit. But for all that I could desire, I could see nothing of this at all, except what was said before in the First Showing, where I saw that the devil is condemned by God and damned without end. In this sight I understood that of all the creatures who are of the devil's condition in this life, and end in it, there is no more mention made before God and all His holy ones than of the devil, even though they are of mankind, whether they have been baptized or not. For though the revelation was shown of goodness, in which little mention was made of evil, I was not drawn by it from any point of the faith that Holy Church teaches me to believe. For I had sight of the Passion of Christ in several showings, in the First, in the Second, in the Fourth and in the Eighth, as was said before; and in them I had in part a feeling of the sorrow of our Lady, and of His true friends who saw His pains. But I did not see the Jews who put Him to death specifically set before me; and nevertheless I knew in my faith that they were accursed and damned without end, except those who were converted by grace.

And I was strengthened, and taught in general to keep myself in the faith in every point, and in all things as I had understood it before, hoping that I was in it with mercy and the grace of God, desiring and praying in my meaning that I might continue in it until my life's end. It is God's will that we have great regard for all the deeds He has done; for by this He wants us to know, trust and believe all that He shall do. But we must always leave off contemplating what the deed shall be, and desire to be like our brothers who are the saints in heaven, who want nothing at all but God's will. Then we shall rejoice only in God, and be well pleased both with hiding and with showing. For I saw truly in our Lord's meaning that the more we busy ourselves to know His secrets in that or in any other thing, the farther we shall be from knowing them.

Chapter 34: Two Kinds of Secret

Our Lord showed two kinds of secrets. One is this great secret, with all the secret points that belong to it; and He wants us to know that these secrets are hidden in this way until the time when He will show them to us clearly. The other is the secrets that He Himself showed openly in this revelation; for these are secrets that He wants to make open and known to us, since He wants us to know that it is His will that we know them. They are secrets to us, but not only because He wants them to be secrets to us; they are secrets to us because of our blindness and our ignorance. And for this He has great pity; and for this He wants to make them open to us Himself, so that by them we may know Him, and love Him, and cling to Him. For all that is profitable for us to learn and to know, our good Lord will most courteously show us, what it is, with all the preaching and teaching of Holy Church. God showed the very great pleasure He has in all men and women who mightily and wisely take in the preaching and teaching of Holy Church; for He Himself is Holy Church. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the teaching, He is the teacher, He is the end, and He is the reward, for which every natural soul labors. And this is known, and shall be known, to every soul to which the Holy Spirit makes it plain. And I hope truly that all those who seek in this way shall succeed, for they seek God. All that I have now said, and more that I shall say hereafter, is comfort against sin. For in the Third Showing, when I saw that God does all that is done, I did not see sin, and then I saw that all is well; but when God showed me about sin, then He said, "All shall be well."

Chapter 35: A Friend I Loved

And when God almighty had shown so plentifully and so fully of His goodness, I wanted to know, about a certain creature that I loved, whether it would continue in good living, which I hoped by the grace of God had begun. And in this singular desire it seemed that I hindered myself, for I was not taught at this time. And then I was answered in my reason, as if by a friendly intermediary: "Take it generally, and look at the courtesy of your Lord God as He shows it to you; for it is more honor to God to look at Him in all things than in any one thing in particular." I assented, and with that I learned that it is more honor to God to know all things in general than to delight in any one thing in particular. And if I were to act wisely according to this teaching, I should not be glad for any one thing in particular, nor greatly distressed for any kind of thing, for "all shall be well." For the fullness of joy is to look at God in all things. For by the same blessed might, wisdom and love by which He made all things, our good Lord leads them continually to the same end, and He Himself shall bring them there; and when it is time we shall see it. And the ground of this was shown in the First Showing, and more openly in the Third, where it says, "I saw God in a point."

All that our Lord does is rightful, and all that He permits is honorable; and in these two good and evil are contained. For all that is good our Lord does, and what is evil our Lord permits. I do not say that evil is honorable; but I say that the permission of our Lord God is honorable, by which His goodness shall be known without end, and His marvelous humility and mildness, by this working of mercy and grace. Rightfulness is that which is so good that it cannot be better than it is. For God Himself is rightfulness itself, and all His works are done rightfully, as they are ordained from before all beginning by His high might, His high wisdom, His high goodness. And just as He has ordained it for the best, so He works continually and leads it to the same end; and He is always fully pleased with Himself and with all His works. And the contemplation of this blessed harmony is most sweet to the soul that sees it by grace. All the souls that shall be saved in heaven without end are made rightful in the sight of God, and by His own goodness; and in this rightfulness we are kept endlessly, and marvelously, above all creatures. And mercy is a working that comes from the goodness of God, and it shall go on working as long as sin is allowed to pursue rightful souls. And when sin no longer has leave to pursue them, then the working of mercy shall cease; and then all shall be brought into rightfulness, and stand in it without end. By His permission we fall; and in His blessed love, with His might and His wisdom, we are kept; and by mercy and grace we are raised to many times more joy. And in this way, in rightfulness and in mercy, He wants to be known and loved, now and without end. And the soul that looks wisely in grace is well pleased with both, and rejoices endlessly.

Chapter 36: A Deed He Will Do

Our Lord God showed that a deed shall be done, and He Himself shall do it; and it shall be honorable and marvelous and plentiful, and by Him it shall be done, and He Himself shall do it. And this is the highest joy that the soul understood: that God Himself shall do it, and I shall do nothing at all but sin, and my sin shall not hinder His goodness from working. And I saw that the contemplation of this is a heavenly joy in a soul that fears God, which always, by nature and by grace, desires God's will. This deed shall be begun here, and it shall be honorable to God and plentifully profitable to all His lovers on earth. And as each of us comes to heaven, we shall see it in marvelous joy. And it shall go on working in this way until the last day; and the honor and the bliss of it shall last in heaven, before God and all His holy saints, without end. This is how this deed was seen and understood in our Lord's meaning; and the reason He showed it is to make us rejoice in Him and in all His works.

When I saw the showing continue, I understood that it was shown for a great thing that was then still to come, a thing that God showed He Himself would do. And this deed has the properties I spoke of before. And He showed this most blissfully, meaning that I should take it wisely, faithfully and trustfully; but what the deed would be was kept secret from me. And in this I saw that He does not want us to be afraid to know the things He shows; He shows them because He wants us to know them, and by this knowing He wants us to love Him, and delight in Him, and rejoice in Him endlessly. And for the great love He has for us He shows us all that is honorable and profitable for the time. And those things that He wants to keep secret for now, He still, of His great goodness, showed them closed. In this showing He wants us to believe and understand that we shall see it truly in His endless bliss. Then we ought to rejoice in Him for all that He shows and all that He hides. And if we do this willingly and humbly, we shall find great ease in it, and we shall have endless thanks from Him for it.

And this is the understanding of this word, "It shall be done by me": that is to say, by man in general, that is, by all who shall be saved. It shall be honorable, marvelous and plentiful, and "By me it shall be done, and God Himself shall do it." And this shall be the highest joy that can be seen in the deed: that God Himself shall do it, and man shall do nothing at all but sin. Then our Lord God means this, as if He said, "Look and see. Here you have matter for humility; here you have matter for love; here you have matter for knowing yourself; here you have matter for rejoicing in me. And for my love rejoice in me, for of all things, with this you could please me most."

And as long as we are in this life, whenever we in our folly turn to looking at the damned, our Lord touches us tenderly and calls us blissfully, saying in our soul, "Leave it all to me, my most dear child. Attend to me; I am enough for you; and rejoice in your Savior and in your salvation." And that this is our Lord's working in us, I am sure the soul that is pierced with it by grace shall see it and feel it. And though it is so that this deed is truly to be taken of man in general, yet it does not exclude the particular; for what our good Lord will do through His poor creatures is now unknown to me. But this deed and the other one spoken of before are not one and the same, but two different deeds. This deed shall be known sooner, and that shall be as we come to heaven; and to whomever our Lord gives it, it may be known here in part. But the great deed spoken of before shall be known neither in heaven nor on earth until it is done.

And furthermore He gave special understanding and teaching about the working and showing of miracles, like this: "It is known that I have done miracles here before now, many of them, very high and marvelous, honorable and great; and as I have done, so I do now continually, and shall in time to come. It is known that before miracles come sorrows and anguish and trouble." And that is so that we should know our own feebleness and the misfortune we have fallen into by sin, to make us humble, and to make us cry to God for help and grace. And great miracles come afterward, from the high might and wisdom and goodness of God, showing His power and the joys of heaven, as far as it can be in this passing life, to strengthen our faith and to increase our hope in charity. And therefore it pleases Him to be known and honored in miracles. Then He means this: He does not want us to be borne down too low by the sorrows and storms that befall us, for it has always been so before miracles come.

Chapter 37: The Will That Never Consented

God brought to my mind that I would sin; and for the delight I had in gazing on Him I did not readily attend to that showing. And our Lord waited most mercifully, and gave me grace to attend. And I took this showing to myself in particular; but by all the gracious comforts that follow, as you shall see, I was taught to take it for all my fellow Christians, all in general and nothing in particular. Though our Lord showed me that I would sin, by me alone all are understood. And at this a soft fear came over me; and to this our Lord answered, "I keep you most surely." This word was said with more love and sureness of spiritual keeping than I can or may tell. For just as it was shown to me before that I would sin, so the comfort was shown: sureness of keeping for all my fellow Christians.

What can make me love my fellow Christians more than to see in God that He loves all who shall be saved as if they were all one soul? For in every soul that shall be saved there is a godly will that never finally assents to sin, and never shall. Just as there is a beastly will in the lower part that can will no good, so there is a godly will in the higher part, which is so good that it can never will evil, now or without end, but always good. And therefore we are what He loves, and endlessly we do what pleases Him. And our good Lord showed this in the wholeness of the love in which we stand in His sight: yes, that He loves us now, while we are here, as well as He shall when we are there before His blessed face. But it is from the failing of love on our part that all our labor comes.

Chapter 38: Sin Turned to Honor

And God showed that sin shall be no shame to man, but honor. For just as to every sin there answers a pain, by truth, so for every sin a bliss is given to the same soul, by love. Just as different sins are punished with different pains according to how grievous they are, so they shall be rewarded with different joys in heaven for their victories, according to how painful and sorrowful the sin has been to the soul on earth. For the soul that shall come to heaven is so precious to God, and the place so honorable, that the goodness of God never allows that soul which shall come there to sin finally. But what sinners they are who shall be rewarded in this way is made known in Holy Church on earth, and also in heaven, by surpassing honors.

For in this sight my understanding was lifted up into heaven; and then God brought merrily to my mind David, and others with him in the Old Law without number. And in the New Law He brought to my mind first Magdalen, Peter and Paul, Thomas and Jude, Saint John of Beverley, and others also without number: how they are known in the church on earth with their sins, and it is no shame to them, but all of it is turned to their honor. And therefore our courteous Lord shows it for them here in part, as it is fulfilled there; for there the token of sin is turned to honor.

And our Lord showed Saint John of Beverley most highly, to comfort us by his familiarity; and He brought to my mind how he is a neighbor of our own kind, and one we know. And God called him plainly "Saint John of Beverley," as we do, and that with a most glad and sweet face, showing that he is a very high saint in His sight, and a blissful one. And with this He made mention that in his youth and in his tender age he was a most dear servant to God, greatly loving God and greatly in dread of Him; and nevertheless God allowed him to fall, keeping him mercifully so that he did not perish or lose any time. And afterward God raised him to many times more grace; and for the contrition and the humility that he had in his life, God has given him many joys in heaven, surpassing what he would have had if he had not sinned or fallen. And that this is true God shows on earth with plentiful miracles worked about his body continually. And all this was to make us glad and merry in love.

Chapter 39: The Scourge of Sin

Sin is the sharpest scourge that any chosen soul can be struck with. This scourge beats a man or woman all to pieces, and breaks him utterly, and purges him in his own sight, so far that at times he thinks himself worthy of nothing but, as it were, to sink into hell, until contrition takes him, by the touch of the Holy Spirit, and turns the bitterness into hope of God's mercy. And then his wounds begin to heal, and the soul to come alive again, turned into the life of Holy Church. The Holy Spirit leads him to confession, willingly to show his sins, nakedly and truly, with great sorrow and great shame that he has so defiled the fair image of God. Then he undertakes penance for every sin, enjoined by his confessor, who is his judge, as it is grounded in Holy Church by the teaching of the Holy Spirit.

And this is one humility that greatly pleases God; and so is taking bodily sickness humbly, as God sends it, and also sorrow and shame from without, with reproof and contempt from the world, and with every kind of grievance and temptation that we are cast into, spiritual and bodily. Our good Lord keeps us most preciously when it seems to us that we are almost forsaken and cast away for our sin, and because we see that we have deserved it. And because of the humility we gain by this, we are raised very high in God's sight by His grace. And also, those whom our Lord wills He visits, of His special grace, with such great contrition, and also with compassion and true longing for God, that they are suddenly delivered from sin and from pain, and taken up to bliss, and made equal with saints. By contrition we are made clean; by compassion we are made ready; and by true longing for God we are made worthy.

These are three means, as I understood it, by which all souls come to heaven: that is to say, those who have been sinners on earth and shall be saved. For by these medicines every sinful soul must be healed. Though he is healed, his wounds are seen before God not as wounds, but as honors. And so, on the contrary, as we are punished here with sorrow and with penance, we shall be rewarded in heaven by the courteous love of our God almighty, who wants none who come there to lose his labor in any degree. For He looks on sin as sorrow and pain to His lovers, to whom, for love, He assigns no blame. The reward that we shall receive shall not be little, but it shall be high, glorious and honorable; and so all shame shall turn to honor and to joy. For our courteous Lord does not want His servants to despair for often failing, nor for grievous falling; for our falling does not hinder Him from loving us. Peace and love are always in us, being and working; but we are not always in peace and in love. But He wants us to take heed of this: that He is the ground of all our whole life in love; and furthermore, that He is our everlasting Keeper, and mightily defends us against all our enemies, who are very cruel and very fierce against us. And our need is all the greater, for we give them occasion by our falling.

Chapter 40: The Friendship of Our Courteous Lord

And this is a sovereign friendship of our courteous Lord, that He keeps us so tenderly while we are in our sin; and furthermore He touches us most secretly, and shows us our sin by the sweet light of mercy and grace. But when we see ourselves so foul, then we suppose that God is angry with us for our sin. Then we are stirred by the Holy Spirit, through contrition, into prayer and desire to amend ourselves with all our might, to appease the wrath of God, until the time we find rest in our soul and ease in our conscience. And then we hope that God has forgiven us our sin, and it is true. And then our courteous Lord shows Himself to the soul merrily, and with a most glad face, with a friendly welcome, as if it had been in pain and in prison, saying this: "My dear darling, I am glad you have come to me in all your woe. I have always been with you, and now you see me loving, and we are made one in bliss." In this way sins are forgiven by grace and mercy, and our soul is honorably received in joy, as it shall be when it comes into heaven, as often as it comes by the gracious working of the Holy Spirit and the power of Christ's Passion. Here I understood truly that all manner of thing is made ready for us by the great goodness of God, so far that whenever we are ourselves in peace and in charity, we are truly safe. But because we cannot have this in fullness while we are here, it falls to us always to live in sweet prayer and in loving longing with our Lord Jesus; for He always longs to bring us to the fullness of joy, as was said before, where He shows the spiritual thirst.

But now, because of all this spiritual comfort that has been spoken of, if any man or woman is stirred by folly to say or to think, "If this is true, then it would be good to sin, to have the greater reward, or else to count sin the less," beware of this impulse. For truly, if it comes, it is untrue, and from the enemy. For the same true love that touches us all with its blessed comfort, the same blessed love teaches us that we must hate sin, for love alone. And I am sure from my own feeling that the more each natural soul sees this in the courteous love of our Lord God, the more loath it is to sin, and the more it is ashamed. For if all the pain that is in hell, and in purgatory, and on earth were laid before us, to suffer it rather than sin, we should choose all that pain rather than sin. For sin is so vile, and so greatly to be hated, that it can be compared to no pain which is not sin. And no harder hell was shown to me than sin; for a natural soul hates no pain but sin, for all is good but sin, and nothing is evil but sin. And when we give our intent to love and humility, by the working of mercy and grace, we are made all fair and clean.

And as mighty and as wise as God is to save man, just as willing He is. For Christ Himself is the ground of all the laws of Christian men, and He taught us to do good in return for evil. Here we may see that He is Himself this charity, and does to us as He teaches us to do; for He wants us to be like Him in the wholeness of endless love toward ourselves and toward our fellow Christians. No more than His love for us is broken by our sin does He want our love to be broken toward ourselves or toward our fellow Christians; but we are to hate sin nakedly, and love the soul endlessly, as God loves it. Then we should hate sin as God hates it, and love the soul as God loves it. For these words that God said are an endless comfort: "I keep you most truly."

Chapter 41: I Am the Ground of Your Beseeching

After this our Lord showed me about prayer. In this showing I saw two conditions in our Lord's meaning: one is rightful prayer, the other is sure trust. But often our trust is not full; for we are not sure that God hears us, because of our unworthiness, as we think, and because we feel nothing at all; for we are often as barren and as dry after our prayers as we were before. And so, in our feeling, our folly is the cause of our weakness: for I have felt this in myself.

And all this our Lord suddenly brought to my mind, and He showed me these words and said: "I am the ground of your beseeching. First, it is my will that you have it; and then I make you will it; and then I make you beseech it, and you beseech it. How could it be, then, that you should not have what you beseech?"

And so in the first reason, with the three that follow, our good Lord shows a mighty comfort, as may be seen in the same words. In the first reason, where He says, "And you beseech it," He shows the very great pleasure He takes in it, and the endless reward that He will give us for our beseeching. And in the second reason, where He says, "How could it be, then?" this was said of an impossible thing; for it is the most impossible thing there can be that we should seek mercy and grace and not have it. For everything that our good Lord makes us beseech, He Himself has ordained for us from before all beginning. Here, then, we may see that our beseeching is not the cause of the goodness and grace He gives us, but His own goodness is. And He showed that truly in all these sweet words, where He says, "I am the ground." And our good Lord wants this to be known by His lovers on earth; and the more we know it, the more we shall beseech, if it is wisely taken; and this is our Lord's meaning.

Beseeching is a true, gracious, lasting will of the soul, made one with the will of our Lord and fastened into it by the sweet secret working of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord Himself is the first receiver of our prayer, as I see it, and He takes it most thankfully; and rejoicing greatly, He sends it up above and sets it in a treasury where it shall never perish. It is there before God, with all His holy saints, continually received, always helping in our needs. And when we receive our bliss, it shall be given to us as a degree of joy, with endless and honorable thanks from Him.

Our Lord is most glad and merry at our prayer; and He looks for it, and He wants to have it; for with His grace it makes us like Himself in condition, as we are like Him by nature; and such is His blessed will. For He says this: "Pray with your whole heart, inwardly, though you think it has no savor for you; it is still profitable enough, though you feel nothing. Pray with your whole heart, inwardly, though you feel nothing, though you see nothing, yes, though you think you cannot. For in dryness and barrenness, in sickness and in feebleness, then your prayer is most pleasing to me, though you think it has little savor for you or none. And so is all your living prayer in my sight."

Because of the reward and the endless thanks that He will give us, He longs to have us praying continually in His sight. God accepts the good will and the labor of His servants, however we feel; and therefore it pleases Him that we work at prayer and at good living, by His help and His grace, reasonably and with discretion, keeping our powers turned to Him, until we have Him whom we seek in the fullness of joy, that is, Jesus. And He showed that in the Fifteenth Revelation, where He says, "You shall have me as your reward."

Thanking also belongs to prayer. Thanking is a true inward knowing, with great reverence and loving dread, turning ourselves with all our powers to the work that our Lord stirred us to, rejoicing and giving thanks inwardly. And sometimes, for very abundance, it breaks out in words and says, "Good Lord, I thank You; blessed may You be." And sometimes, when the heart is dry and feels nothing, or else through the temptation of our enemy, then the soul is driven by reason and by grace to cry aloud to our Lord, recounting His blessed Passion and His great goodness. And so the power of our Lord's word turns into the soul, and quickens the heart, and by His grace leads it into true working, and makes it pray most blissfully. And truly to rejoice in our Lord is a most loving thanks in His sight.

Chapter 42: Where Prayer Comes From

Our Lord wants us to have true understanding, and especially of three things that belong to our prayer. The first is by whom and how our prayer springs. By whom, He shows when He says, "I am the ground"; and how, by His goodness, for He says, "First, it is my will." The second is in what manner and how we should use our prayers; and that is, that our will be turned into the will of our Lord, rejoicing; and this is what He means when He says, "I make you will it." The third is that we know the fruit and the end of our prayer: that is, to be made one with our Lord and like Him in all things. And to this meaning and for this end all this lovely lesson was shown; and He will help us, and He shall make it so, as He says Himself; blessed may He be.

For this is our Lord's will, that our prayer and our trust be alike, both of them large; for if we do not trust as much as we pray, we do not give full honor to our Lord in our prayer. And we also hold ourselves back and torment ourselves; and the cause, as I believe, is that we do not truly know that our Lord is the ground from whom our prayer springs, and also that we do not know that it is given us by the grace of His love. For if we knew this, it would make us trust to have from our Lord's gift all that we desire; for I am sure that no one asks for mercy and grace with a true intention unless mercy and grace have first been given to him.

But sometimes it comes to our mind that we have prayed for a long time, and yet it seems to us that we do not have what we asked. But we should not be heavy-hearted because of this; for I am sure, by our Lord's meaning, that either we are waiting for a better time, or more grace, or a better gift. He wants us to have true knowledge in Himself that He is being itself; and in this knowledge He wants our understanding to be grounded with all our powers, and all our intent, and all our meaning; and in this ground He wants us to take our place and our dwelling. And by the gracious light of Himself He wants us to have understanding of the three things that follow. The first is our noble and excellent making. The second, our precious and most dear redemption. The third, all things that He has made beneath us to serve us, and that He keeps for love of us. Then He means this, as if He said, "Look and see that I have done all this before your prayer; and now you are, and you pray to me." And so He means that it belongs to us to know that the greatest deeds are done, as Holy Church teaches.

And in contemplating this, with thanks, we ought to pray for the deed that is now being done: and that is, that He rule us and guide us to His honor in this life, and bring us to His bliss; and for this He has done everything. Then He means this: that we see that He does it, and that we pray for it; for the one is not enough. For if we pray and do not see that He does it, it makes us heavy and doubtful, and that is no honor to Him. And if we see that He does it and we do not pray, we do not do our duty; and so it cannot be; that is to say, that is not how it is in His sight. But to see that He does it, and to pray at the same time: in this way He is honored, and we prosper. Everything that our Lord has ordained to do, it is His will that we pray for, either in particular or in general. And the joy and the bliss that this is to Him, and the thanks and the honor that we shall have for it, surpass the understanding of every creature in this life, as I see it.

For prayer is a right understanding of that fullness of joy which is to come, with true longing and real trust. Tasting or seeing our bliss, to which we are ordained, makes us long by nature; true understanding and love, with sweet thought of our Savior, makes us trust by grace. And so by nature we have longing, and by grace we have trust; and in these two workings our Lord looks on us continually, for it is our duty, and His goodness can assign no less to us. It belongs to us to do our diligence in this; and when we have done it, it shall still seem to us that it is nothing, and so it is. But let us do what we can, and humbly ask for mercy and grace, and all that we lack we shall find in Him. And this is what He means where He says, "I am the ground of your beseeching." And so in these blissful words, with the showing, I saw a full overcoming of all our wickedness and all our doubtful dreads.

Chapter 43: Prayer Makes Us One with God

Prayer makes the soul one with God. For the soul is always like God in nature and in substance, restored by grace; but it is often unlike Him in condition, through sin on man's part. Then prayer is a witness that the soul wills as God wills; and it comforts the conscience, and makes a man able for grace. And so He teaches us to pray, and to trust mightily that we shall have what we pray for; for He looks on us in love, and wants to make us partners in His good will and His deed. And therefore He stirs us to pray for what it pleases Him to do; and for this prayer and good will, which we have as His gift, He will reward us and give us an endless reward.

And this was shown in these words: "And you beseech it." In these words God showed such great pleasure and such great delight, as if He were much beholden to us for each good deed that we do; and yet it is He who does it. And this is because we beseech Him mightily to do the thing that pleases Him; as if He said, "What could please me more than that you beseech me, mightily, wisely and willingly, to do the thing that I want done?" And so the soul by prayer is brought into accord with God.

But when our courteous Lord, of His special grace, shows Himself to our soul, we have what we desire; and then for that time we do not see what more we should pray for, but all our intent, with all our powers, is set wholly on contemplating Him. And this is a high prayer, beyond our perceiving, as I see it; for the whole cause for which we pray is to be made one in the sight and contemplation of Him to whom we pray, rejoicing marvelously with reverent dread, and with such great sweetness and delight in Him that we can pray nothing at all except as He stirs us for that time. And well I know, the more the soul sees of God, the more it desires Him by grace. But when we do not see Him in this way, then we feel need and cause to pray to Jesus, because of our failing and our own inability. For when a soul is tempted, troubled, and left to itself by its unrest, then it is time to pray, to make itself pliant and obedient to God; but the soul by no manner of prayer makes God pliant to it, for He is always the same in love.

And so I saw that whenever we see a need for which we pray, then our Lord God follows us, helping our desire; and when we, of His special grace, plainly see Him, seeing no other need, then we follow Him, and He draws us to Himself by love. For I saw and felt that His marvelous and abundant goodness fills all our powers. And with this I saw that His continual working in all manner of things is done so divinely, so wisely and so mightily that it surpasses all our imagining, and all that we can suppose or think. And then we can do no more than contemplate Him and rejoice, with a high and mighty desire to be wholly made one with Him, and attend to His stirring, and rejoice in His loving, and delight in His goodness.

And so we shall, with His sweet grace, in our own humble and continual prayer, come to Him now in this life by many secret touches of sweet spiritual sights and feelings, measured out to us as our simplicity can bear it. And this is done, and shall be done, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, until we die in longing, for love. And then we shall all come into our Lord, knowing ourselves clearly and having God fully; and we shall be endlessly hidden in God, truly seeing Him and fully feeling Him, hearing Him spiritually, and delectably smelling Him, and sweetly swallowing Him. And there we shall see God face to face, familiarly and fully. The creature that is made shall see God, who is the Maker, and contemplate Him endlessly. For no man may see God in this way and live afterward, that is to say, in this mortal life. But when He, of His special grace, wants to show Himself here, He strengthens the creature above itself, and He measures the showing according to His own will, and it is profitable for the time.

Chapter 44: Truth, Wisdom and Love

God showed often in all the Revelations that man always works His will and His honor, lastingly and without stopping. And what this working is was shown in the First, and that on a marvelous ground: for it was shown in the working of the blissful soul of our Lady Saint Mary, by truth and wisdom. And how, I hope by the grace of the Holy Spirit to tell as I saw it. Truth sees God, and wisdom contemplates God, and from these two comes the third, and that is a marvelous delight in God, which is love. Where truth and wisdom truly are, there love truly is, coming from them both, and all of God's making. For God is endless sovereign truth, endless sovereign wisdom, endless sovereign love, unmade. And a man's soul is a creature in God, which has the same properties, made; and it always does what it was made for: it sees God, it contemplates God, and it loves God. And so God rejoices in the creature, and the creature in God, marveling endlessly. In this marveling the creature sees his God, his Lord, his Maker, so high, so great and so good compared with him who is made, that the creature scarcely seems anything to himself. But the brightness and the clearness of truth and wisdom make him see and know that he is made for love, and in this love God keeps him endlessly.

Chapter 45: Two Judgments

God judges us by our natural substance, which is always kept one in Him, whole and safe without end; and this judgment comes from His rightfulness. And man judges us by our changeable sensuality, which seems now one thing, now another, according to what it takes from the parts, and shows outwardly. And this judgment is mixed; for sometimes it is good and easy, and sometimes it is hard and grievous. And in so far as it is good and easy, it belongs to the rightfulness; and in so far as it is hard and grievous, our good Lord Jesus reforms it by mercy and grace, through the power of His blessed Passion, and so brings it to the rightfulness.⁵

And though these two are brought into accord and made one in this way, yet both shall be known in heaven without end. The first judgment, which is of God's rightfulness, comes from His own high, endless love; and that is the fair, sweet judgment that was shown in all the fair revelation, in which I saw Him assign to us no manner of blame. And though this was sweet and delightful, yet in contemplating this alone I could not be fully eased; and that was because of the judgment of Holy Church, which I had understood before and which was continually in my sight. And therefore by this judgment it seemed to me that I must know myself to be a sinner; and by the same judgment I understood that sinners are sometimes worthy of blame and wrath; and these two I could not see in God. And therefore my deliberation and my desire were more than I can or may tell. For the higher judgment God Himself showed at the same time, and therefore I had to accept it; and the lower judgment I had been taught before in Holy Church, and therefore I could in no way give up the lower judgment. Then this was my desire: that I might see in God in what way the judgment of Holy Church here on earth is true in His sight, and how it belongs to me truly to know it, so that both might be upheld, as would be honorable to God and the right way for me.

And to all this I had no other answer but a marvelous example of a lord and a servant, as I shall tell later, and that was shown very obscurely. And yet I have stood in this desire and will, and shall to my life's end, that I might by grace know these two judgments as it belongs to me. For all heavenly things, and all earthly things that belong to heaven, are comprehended in these two judgments. And the more knowledge and understanding of these two judgments we have, by the gracious leading of the Holy Spirit, the more we shall see and know our failings; and the more we see them, the more we shall long by nature, through grace, to be filled with endless joy and bliss, for we are made for it.

And our natural substance is now blissfully in God, and has been since it was made, and shall be without end.

Chapter 46: Knowing Ourselves

But this passing life that we have here in our sensuality does not know what our self is, except by our faith. And when we know and see truly and clearly what our self is, then we shall truly and clearly see and know our Lord God in the fullness of joy. And therefore it must be that the nearer we are to our bliss, the more we shall long for it, and that both by nature and by grace. We may have knowledge of our self in this life by the continual help and power of our high nature; and in this knowledge we may increase and grow, as mercy and grace further us and help us on. But we can never fully know our self until the last point, the point at which this passing life, and every manner of woe and pain, shall have an end. And therefore it belongs properly to us, both by grace and by nature, to long and desire with all our powers to know our self; and in that full knowledge we shall truly and clearly know our God in the fullness of endless joy.

And yet all this time, from the beginning to the end, I had two ways of seeing. The one was endless, continuing love, with the sureness of being kept, and blissful salvation, for of this was all the showing. The other was the common teaching of Holy Church, in which I had been instructed and grounded before, and which I willingly held in practice and in understanding. And the sight of this did not leave me; for by the showing I was not stirred or led away from it in any point at all. But in the showing I was taught to love it and delight in it, so that I might, with the help of our Lord and His grace, increase and rise to more heavenly knowledge and higher loving.

And so in all this contemplation it seemed to me that I had to see and know that we are sinners, and do many evils that we ought to give up, and leave undone many good deeds that we ought to do; for which we deserve pain, blame and wrath. And notwithstanding all this, I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never shall be. For He is God, He is good, He is truth, He is love, and He is peace; and His might, His wisdom, His charity and His unity do not allow Him to be angry. For I saw truly that it is against the property of His might to be angry, and against the property of His wisdom, and against the property of His goodness. God is the goodness that cannot be angry, for God is nothing but goodness. Our soul is made one with Him, unchangeable goodness; and between God and our soul there is neither wrath nor forgiveness in His sight. For our soul is so fully made one with God, of His own goodness, that between God and our soul there can be nothing at all.

And to this understanding the soul was led by love and drawn by might in every showing. That it is so, our good Lord showed; and how it is truly so, of His great goodness; and He wants us to desire to know it, that is to say, as far as it belongs to His creatures to know it. For everything that the simple soul understood, God wants to be shown and known. And the things that He wants kept secret, He Himself mightily and wisely hides, for love. For I saw in the same showing that much that is secret is hidden, which can never be known until the time that God, of His goodness, has made us worthy to see it. And with this I am well content, waiting on our Lord's will in this high marvel. And now I yield myself to our mother Holy Church, as a simple child ought.

Chapter 47: Wonder and Patience

Two things belong to our soul as a duty. One is that we marvel reverently. The other is that we endure humbly, always rejoicing in God; for He wants us to know that in a short time we shall see clearly in Himself all that we desire. And notwithstanding all this, I contemplated and marveled greatly: what is the mercy and forgiveness of God? For by the teaching I had before, I understood that the mercy of God would be the forgiveness of His wrath after the time that we have sinned; for it seemed to me that to a soul whose intent and desire is to love, the wrath of God would be harder than any other pain. And therefore I took it that the forgiveness of His wrath must be one of the principal points of His mercy. But for all that I could contemplate and desire, I could not see this point anywhere in the whole showing.

But how I saw and understood the working of mercy I shall tell in part, as God will give me grace. I understood this: man is changeable in this life, and through simplicity and ignorance he falls into sin. He is powerless and unwise of himself, and his will is also overwhelmed. In this time he is in tempest, and in sorrow and woe; and the cause is blindness, for he does not see God. For if he saw God continually, he would have no harmful feeling, nor any kind of stirring or sorrowing that serves sin.

This I saw, and felt at the same time; and it seemed to me that the sight and the feeling were high, and plentiful, and gracious, compared with what our common feeling is in this life; but yet it seemed to me only low and small compared with the great desire the soul has to see God. For I felt in myself five kinds of working, which are these: rejoicing, mourning, desire, dread, and true hope. Rejoicing, for God gave me understanding and knowledge that it was Himself I saw. Mourning, and that was for failing. Desire, and that was that I might see Him ever more and more, understanding and knowing that we shall never have full rest until we see Him clearly and truly in heaven. Dread was because it seemed to me all that time that the sight would fail, and I would be left to myself. True hope was in the endless love that I saw, that I would be kept by His mercy and brought to bliss. And rejoicing in His sight, with this true hope of His merciful keeping, made me have feeling and comfort, so that mourning and dread were not very painful.

And yet in all this I saw in the showing of God that this kind of sight of Him cannot be continual in this life, and that is for His own honor and for the increase of our endless joy. And therefore we often fail of the sight of Him; and at once we fall into ourselves, and then we find no feeling of anything at all but the contrariness that is in ourselves. And that comes from the old root of our first sin, with all that follows from our own continuing in it; and in this we labor and are tempted, with the feeling of sin and of pain in many different ways, spiritual and bodily, as is known to us in this life.

Chapter 48: Mercy and Grace

But our good Lord the Holy Spirit, who is endless life dwelling in our soul, keeps us most truly, and works a peace in it, and brings it to ease by grace, and makes it obedient, and brings it into accord with God. And this is the mercy and the way in which our good Lord continually leads us, as long as we are in this life, which is changeable. For I saw no wrath but on man's part, and that He forgives in us. For wrath is nothing else but a perversity and a contrariness to peace and love. And it comes either from a failing of might, or from a failing of wisdom, or from a failing of goodness; and this failing is not of God, but is on our part. For through sin and wretchedness we have in us a wrath, and a continuing contrariness to peace and to love. And He showed that very often in His lovely face of compassion and pity.

For the ground of mercy is in love, and the working of mercy is our keeping in love. And this was shown in such a way that I could not perceive the property of mercy otherwise than as if it were all love in love. That is to say, as I see it, mercy is a sweet, gracious working in love, mingled with plentiful pity. For mercy works, keeping us; and mercy works, turning all things to good for us. Mercy, for love, allows us to fail in measure; and in so far as we fail, so far we fall; and in so far as we fall, so far we die. For we must die in so far as we fail of the sight and feeling of God, who is our life. Our failing is fearsome, our falling is shameful, and our dying is sorrowful. But yet in all this the sweet eye of pity and love never departs from us, nor does the working of mercy cease.

For I contemplated the property of mercy, and I contemplated the property of grace, which have two ways of working in one love. Mercy is a compassionate property, which belongs to motherhood in tender love; and grace is an honorable property, which belongs to royal lordship in the same love. Mercy works, keeping, permitting, quickening and healing, and all of it is of the tenderness of love. And grace works with mercy, raising, rewarding, endlessly surpassing what our loving and our labor deserve, spreading abroad and showing the high abundance and largeness of God's royal lordship in His marvelous courtesy. And this is of the abundance of love. For grace turns our fearsome failing into plentiful and endless solace; and grace turns our shameful falling into high and honorable rising; and grace turns our sorrowful dying into holy and blissful life.

For I saw most truly that just as our contrariness works pain, shame and sorrow for us here on earth, so, on the contrary, grace works solace, honor and bliss for us in heaven, and surpasses them so far that when we come up and receive the sweet reward which grace has made for us there, we shall thank and bless our Lord endlessly, rejoicing that we ever suffered woe. And that shall be because of a property of blessed love that we shall know in God, which we could never have known without woe going before. And when I saw all this, I had to grant that the mercy and the forgiveness of God slacken and waste away our wrath.

Chapter 49: God Is Never Angry

For it was a high marvel to the soul, which was shown continually in all the showings and was gazed on with great diligence, that our Lord God, as for Himself, cannot forgive, because He cannot be angry. It would be impossible. For this was shown: that our life is all grounded and rooted in love, and without love we cannot live. And therefore, to the soul that by His special grace sees so far into the high, marvelous goodness of God that it sees we are endlessly made one with Him in love, it is the most impossible thing there can be that God should be angry. For wrath and friendship are two contraries. For since it is He who wastes away and destroys our wrath, and makes us humble and mild, we cannot but believe that He is always in one love, humble and mild, which is the contrary of wrath.

For I saw most truly that where our Lord appears, peace is taken, and wrath has no place. For I saw no kind of wrath in God, neither for a short time nor for a long one; for truly, as I see it, if God could be angry even for a while, we should have neither life, nor place, nor being. For just as truly as we have our being from the endless might of God, and from the endless wisdom, and from the endless goodness, just as truly we have our keeping in the endless might of God, in the endless wisdom, and in the endless goodness. For though we feel in ourselves wrath, quarreling and strife, yet we are all mercifully enclosed in the mildness of God, and in His humility, in His benignity, and in His yielding gentleness. For I saw most truly that all our endless friendship, our place, our life and our being are in God.

For the same endless goodness that keeps us when we sin, so that we do not perish, that same endless goodness continually makes a peace in us against our wrath and our contrary falling, and makes us see our need, with a true dread, to seek God mightily for forgiveness, with a gracious desire for our salvation. For we cannot be blissfully saved until we are truly in peace and in love, for that is our salvation. And though, by the wrath and the contrariness that is in us, we are now in tribulation, distress and woe, as falls to our blindness and our proneness to sin, yet we are sure and safe by the merciful keeping of God, so that we do not perish. But we are not blissfully safe, in having our endless joy, until we are all in peace and in love: that is to say, fully pleased with God, and with all His works, and with all His judgments, and loving and at peace with ourselves, and with our fellow Christians, and with all that God loves, as love pleases. And this is what God's goodness does in us.

In this way I saw that God is our true peace; and He is our sure keeper when we ourselves are not at peace; and He works continually to bring us into endless peace. And so, when by the working of mercy and grace we are made humble and mild, then we are fully safe. Suddenly the soul is made one with God, when it is truly at peace in itself; for in Him no wrath is found. And so I saw that when we are all in peace and in love, we find no contrariness and no hindrance of any kind. And the contrariness that is now in us, our Lord God of His goodness makes most profitable to us. For contrariness is the cause of all our tribulation and all our woe; and our Lord Jesus takes them and sends them up to heaven, and there they are made sweeter and more delightful than heart can think or tongue can tell. And when we come there, we shall find them ready, all turned into true beauty and endless honor. In this way God is our steadfast ground; and He shall be our full bliss, and make us unchangeable, as He is, when we are there.

Chapter 50: Blame and No Blame

And in this mortal life mercy and forgiveness are our way, and they always lead us to grace. And by the tempest and the sorrow that we fall into on our part, we are often dead as men judge on earth; but in the sight of God the soul that shall be saved was never dead, and never shall be.

But yet here I wondered and marveled with all the diligence of my soul, saying within me, "Good Lord, I see that You are truth itself, and I know truly that we sin grievously all day long and are much to blame; and I can neither let go of knowing this truth, nor do I see You showing us any kind of blame. How can this be? For I know by the common teaching of Holy Church, and by my own feeling, that the blame of our sins hangs on us continually, from the first man until the time we come up into heaven."

This, then, was my marvel: that I saw our Lord God showing us no more blame than if we were as clean and as holy as the angels are in heaven. And between these two contraries my reason labored greatly in my blindness, and could have no rest, for fear that His blessed presence would pass from my sight and I would be left not knowing how He looks on us in our sin. For either I had to see in God that sin was all done away, or else I had to see in God how He sees it, so that I might truly know how it belongs to me to see sin, and the manner of our blame.

My longing endured, and I gazed on Him continually; and yet I could have no patience, for great fear and perplexity, thinking, "If I take it this way, that we are not sinners and not to blame, it seems I would err and fail to know this truth. And if it is true that we are sinners and to blame, good Lord, how can it be, then, that I cannot see this truth in You, who are my God, my Maker, in whom I desire to see all truth?"

For three points make me bold to ask it. The first is that it is so low a thing; for if it were a high one, I would be afraid. The second is that it is so common; for if it were special and secret too, I would be afraid. The third is that I need to know it, as it seems to me, if I am to live here, for the knowing of good and evil, by which I may, by reason and by grace, separate them the better, and love goodness and hate evil, as Holy Church teaches.

I cried inwardly with all my might, seeking God for help, saying this: "Ah, Lord Jesus, King of bliss, how shall I be eased? Who shall tell me and teach me what I need to know, if I cannot see it in You at this time?"

Chapter 51: The Lord and the Servant

And then our courteous Lord answered by showing, very mistily, a wonderful example of a lord who has a servant, and He gave me sight in my understanding of both. This sight was shown twofold in the lord, and the sight was shown twofold in the servant. The one part was shown spiritually, in bodily likeness. The other part was shown more spiritually, without bodily likeness.

For the first, I saw two persons in bodily likeness, that is to say, a lord and a servant; and with it God gave me spiritual understanding. The lord sits in majesty, in rest and in peace. The servant stands before his lord reverently, ready to do his lord's will. The lord looks on his servant most lovingly and sweetly and humbly, and sends him to a certain place to do his will. The servant does not merely go, but suddenly leaps up and runs in great haste, for love, to do his lord's will. And at once he falls into a dell and suffers very great sorrow; and then he groans and moans and wallows and writhes, but he cannot rise or help himself in any way.

And in all this, the greatest misfortune I saw him in was the lack of comfort; for he could not turn his face to look on his loving lord, who was very near him, and in whom is full comfort; but like a man who was very feeble and foolish for the time, he attended to his feeling and endured in woe.

In this woe he suffered seven great pains. The first was the painful bruising he took in his falling, which gave him much pain. The second was the heaviness of his body. The third was the feebleness that followed from these two. The fourth was that he was blinded in his reason and stunned in his memory, so far that he had almost forgotten his own love. The fifth was that he could not rise. The sixth was the pain most marvelous to me, and that was that he lay alone: I looked all about, and far or near, high or low, I saw no help for him. The seventh was that the place he lay in was long, hard and grievous.

I marveled how this servant could suffer all this woe so humbly. And I looked with care, to know whether I could see any fault in him, or whether the lord would assign him any kind of blame. And truly there was none to be seen; for only his good will and his great desire were the cause of his falling. And he was as willing, and as good inwardly, as he was when he stood before his lord, ready to do his will.

And just so, continually, his loving lord looks on him most tenderly; and now with a twofold face. One was outward, most humbly and mildly, with great compassion and pity; and this was of the first part. The other was inward, more spiritual; and this was shown by a leading of my understanding into the lord, in which I saw him rejoice highly over the honorable restoring that he will and shall bring his servant to by his plentiful grace; and this was of the other showing.

And now my understanding was led back again into the first, keeping both in mind. Then this courteous lord said in his meaning, "Look, my beloved servant, what harm and distress he has had and taken in my service, for my love, yes, and for his good will. Is it not right that I reward him for his fright and his dread, his hurt and his maiming, and all his woe? And not only this, but does it not fall to me to give him a gift that is better for him, and more honorable, than his own wholeness would have been? Or else it seems to me I would be doing him no grace."

And in this, an inward spiritual showing of the lord's meaning descended into my soul, in which I saw that it had to be, given his great goodness and his own honor, that his most dear servant, whom he loved so much, should be highly and honorably rewarded without end, above what he would have been if he had not fallen; yes, and so far that his falling, and all the woe he has taken by it, shall be turned into high, surpassing honor and endless bliss.

And at this point the showing of the example vanished, and our good Lord led my understanding on, in sight and in showing of the revelation, to the end. But for all this leading on, my marveling at the example never left me; for it seemed to me that it was given me as an answer to my desire, and yet I could not take full understanding of it, to my ease, at that time. For in the servant, who was shown for Adam, as I shall tell, I saw many different properties that could in no way be attributed to Adam alone. And so at that time I remained much in unknowing; for the full understanding of this marvelous example was not given me at that time. In this misty example the secrets of the revelation are still much hidden. And notwithstanding this, I saw and understood that every showing is full of secrets.

And therefore I must now tell three properties by which I am somewhat eased. The first is the beginning of teaching that I understood in it at the same time. The second is the inward learning that I have understood in it since. The third is the whole revelation, from the beginning to the end, which our Lord God of His goodness often brings freely before the sight of my understanding. And these three are so made one, as I understand it, that I cannot and may not separate them. And by these three as one I have teaching by which I ought to believe and trust in our Lord God that, of the same goodness with which He showed it, and for the same end, just so, of the same goodness and for the same end, He shall make it plain to us when it is His will.

For twenty years after the time of the showing, less three months, I had teaching inwardly, as I shall tell: "It belongs to you to take heed of all the properties and the conditions that were shown in the example, though you think that it is misty and indistinct to your sight." I assented willingly, with great desire, looking inwardly with care at all the points and the properties that were shown at the same time, as far as my wit and my understanding would serve. I began with my looking at the lord and at the servant: at the lord's manner of sitting, and the place he sat on, and the color of his clothing, and its shape, and his outward face, and his nobility and his goodness within; and at the servant's manner of standing, and the place where, and how; and at his manner of clothing, its color and its shape; at his outward bearing, and at his inward goodness and his willingness.

The lord who sat in majesty, in rest and in peace, I understand to be God. The servant who stood before him, I understood to be shown for Adam; that is to say, one man and his falling were shown at that time, to make it understood by this how God looks on all mankind and its falling. For in the sight of God all mankind is one man, and one man is all mankind. This man was hurt in his might and made very feeble, and he was stunned in his understanding, for he was turned from looking on his lord. But his will was kept in God's sight; for I saw our Lord commend and approve his will. But he himself was hindered and blinded from knowing this will; and this is great sorrow and grievous distress to him. For he neither sees clearly his loving lord, who is most humble and mild to him, nor does he see truly what he himself is in the sight of his loving lord. And I know well that when these two are seen wisely and truly, we shall get rest and peace here in part, and the fullness of bliss in heaven, by His plentiful grace.

And this was a beginning of teaching which I saw at that same time, by which I might come to know how He looks on us in our sin. And then I saw that only pain blames and punishes, and our courteous Lord comforts and helps. And He is always toward the soul with a glad face, longing and loving to bring us to His bliss.

The place that the lord sat on was simple, on the earth, barren and desert, alone in a wilderness. His clothing was full and long, and most becoming, as befits a lord. The color of the clothing was blue as azure, most deep and fair. His face was merciful; the color of his face was fair, brown and white, with a most becoming countenance; his eyes were black, most fair and becoming, showing full of loving pity; and within him was a high enclosure, long and broad, all full of endless heavenliness. And the loving look with which he looked on his servant continually, and especially in his falling, seemed to me as if it might melt our hearts for love and burst them in two for joy.

This fair look showed a becoming mixture, which was marvelous to see. The one part was compassion and pity, the other joy and bliss. The joy and bliss surpass the compassion and pity as far as heaven is above earth: the pity was earthly, and the bliss heavenly. The compassion and the pity of the Father were for the falling of Adam, who is His most loved creature; the joy and the bliss were for the falling of His most dear Son, who is equal with the Father. The merciful look of His loving face filled all the earth and went down with Adam into hell, and by this continual pity Adam was kept from endless death. And this mercy and pity dwell with mankind until the time we come up into heaven.

But man is blinded in this life, and therefore we cannot see our Father, God, as He is. And when He of His goodness wills to show Himself to man, He shows Himself familiarly, as man; although I saw truly that we ought to know and believe that the Father is not man.

But his sitting on the earth, barren and desert, means this. He made man's soul to be His own city and His dwelling place, which is the most pleasing to Him of all His works. And when man had fallen into sorrow and pain, he was not wholly fit to serve in that noble office. And therefore our natural Father would prepare Himself no other place, but would sit upon the earth, waiting for mankind, which is mixed with earth, until the time when, by His grace, His most dear Son had brought His city back again into its noble beauty with His hard labor.

The blueness of the clothing signifies His steadfastness. The brownness of his fair face, with the becoming blackness of the eyes, was most fitting to show His holy soberness. The fullness of his clothing, which was fair and flaming all about him, signifies that He has enclosed in Himself all heavens, and all endless joy and bliss. And this was shown in a touch, where I saw that my understanding was led into the lord, in which I saw him rejoice highly over the honorable restoring that he will and shall bring his servant to by his plentiful grace.

And still I marveled, looking at the lord and the servant I have spoken of. I saw the lord sit in majesty, and the servant standing reverently before his lord. In this servant there is a twofold understanding, one outward, the other inward. Outwardly, he was clad simply, like a laborer who was ready for labor; and he stood very near the lord, not directly in front of him, but partly to one side, and that on the left side. His clothing was a white tunic, unlined, old and all marred, stained with the sweat of his body, tight on him and short, as it were a handbreadth below the knee; threadbare, seeming as if it would soon be worn through, ready to be ragged and torn. And at this I marveled greatly, thinking, "This is now an unbecoming garment for a servant who is so highly loved to stand in before so honorable a lord." And inwardly in him was shown a ground of love; and the love he had for the lord was equal to the love the lord had for him.

The wisdom of the servant saw inwardly that there was one thing to do which would be to the lord's honor. And the servant, for love, having no regard for himself or for anything that might befall him, hastily leapt up and ran at his lord's sending, to do that thing which was his lord's will and his honor. For it seemed by his outward clothing as if he had been a laborer continually, and had labored hard for a long time. And by the inward sight that I had, both of the lord and of the servant, it seemed that he was new, that is to say, only now beginning to labor: a servant who had never been sent out before.

There was a treasure in the earth which the lord loved. I marveled and wondered what it might be, and I was answered in my understanding, "It is a food which is delightful and pleasing to the lord." For I saw the lord sit as a man, and I saw neither food nor drink with which to serve him. This was one marvel. Another marvel was that this majestic lord had no servant but one, and him he sent out. I looked, wondering what kind of labor it might be that the servant was to do. And then I understood that he was to do the greatest labor and the hardest toil: he was to be a gardener, digging and ditching and sweating, and turning the earth up and down, and seeking the depths, and watering the plants in their season. And in this he was to keep on at his labor, and make floods of sweat run, and noble and plentiful fruit spring up, which he was to bring before the lord and serve him with to his delight. And he was never to turn back until he had prepared this food all ready, as he knew it pleased the lord; and then he was to take this food, with the drink, and carry it most honorably before the lord. And all this time the lord was to sit in that same place, waiting for the servant whom he had sent out.

And still I marveled where the servant came from. For I saw in the lord that he has within himself endless life and every kind of goodness, except the treasure that was in the earth; and that too was grounded in the lord, in the marvelous depth of endless love. But it was not wholly to his honor until his servant had prepared it so nobly and brought it before him, present in his own person. And outside the lord there was nothing at all but wilderness. And I did not understand all that this example meant; and that is why I marveled where the servant came from.

In the servant is contained the Second Person of the Trinity; and in the servant is contained Adam, that is to say, all men. And therefore, when I say the Son, it means the Godhead, which is equal with the Father; and when I say the servant, it means Christ's manhood, which is the true Adam. By the nearness of the servant is understood the Son, and by the standing on the left side is understood Adam. The lord is God the Father; the servant is the Son, Jesus Christ; the Holy Spirit is the equal love that is in them both.

When Adam fell, God's Son fell, because of the true union that was made in heaven: God's Son could not be separated from Adam, for by Adam I understand all mankind. Adam fell from life to death, into the dell of this wretched world, and after that into hell. God's Son fell with Adam into the dell of the maiden's womb, she who was the fairest daughter of Adam; and that was to excuse Adam from blame in heaven and on earth. And mightily He fetched him out of hell.

By the wisdom and the goodness that were in the servant is understood God's Son; by the poor clothing, as of a laborer standing near the left side, is understood the manhood of Adam, with all the misfortune and feebleness that follow. For in all this our good Lord showed His own Son and Adam as only one man. The virtue and the goodness that we have are from Jesus Christ; the feebleness and the blindness that we have are from Adam; and these two were shown in the servant.

And so our good Lord Jesus has taken upon Himself all our blame; and therefore our Father neither may nor will assign any more blame to us than to His own most dear Son, Jesus Christ. In this way He was the servant before His coming to earth, standing ready before the Father in purpose until the time when the Father would send Him to do the honorable deed by which mankind was brought back again into heaven; that is to say, notwithstanding that He is God, equal with the Father as regards the Godhead. But in His foreseeing purpose that He would be man, to save man by fulfilling His Father's will, He stood before His Father as a servant, willingly taking upon Himself all our charge. And then He leapt up most readily at the Father's will, and at once He fell very low, into the maiden's womb, having no regard for Himself or for His hard pains.

The white tunic is the flesh; its being unlined means that there was nothing at all between the Godhead and the manhood; the tightness is poverty; the age is from Adam's wearing; the marring is the sweat of Adam's labor; the shortness shows the servant as a laborer.

And so I saw the Son stand, saying in His meaning, "Look, my dear Father, I stand before You in Adam's tunic, all ready to leap up and to run. I would be on the earth, to Your honor, when it is Your will to send me. How long shall I desire it?" Most truly the Son knew when it was the Father's will, and how long He would desire it: that is to say, as regards the Godhead, for He is the Wisdom of the Father. And so this meaning was shown in understanding of the manhood of Christ. For all mankind that shall be saved by the sweet Incarnation and Passion of Christ, all of it is the manhood of Christ; for He is the head, and we are His members. And to these members the day and the time are unknown when every passing woe and sorrow shall have an end, and the everlasting joy and bliss shall be fulfilled. That day and time all the company of heaven longs and desires to see; and for all who are under heaven and shall come there, their way is by longing and desiring. This desiring and longing was shown in the servant standing before the lord; or else thus, in the Son standing before the Father in Adam's tunic. For the longing and desiring of all mankind that shall be saved appeared in Jesus; for Jesus is in all who shall be saved, and all who shall be saved are in Jesus. And all of this is of the charity of God, with obedience, humility and patience, and the virtues that belong to us.

Also in this marvelous example I have teaching within me, as it were the beginning of an ABC, by which I may have some understanding of our Lord's meaning; for the secrets of the revelation are hidden in it, notwithstanding that all the showings are full of secrets.

The sitting of the Father signifies the Godhead, that is to say, by showing rest and peace; for in the Godhead there can be no labor. And that He shows Himself as lord signifies His relation to our manhood. The standing of the servant signifies labor; and the standing on the left side signifies that he was not wholly worthy to stand directly in front of the lord. His leaping up was the Godhead, and the running was the manhood; for the Godhead leapt from the Father into the maiden's womb, falling into the taking of our nature. And in this falling He took great hurt. The hurt that He took was our flesh, in which, as soon as He took it, He had feeling of mortal pains.

That He stood in dread before the lord, and not directly in front of him, signifies that His clothing was not decent for standing directly in front of the lord; nor could that or should that be His office while He was a laborer; nor could He sit with the lord in rest and peace until He had won His peace rightfully with His hard labor. And by the left side is meant that the Father left His own Son willingly in the manhood, to suffer all man's pain without sparing Him.

By his tunic being on the point of being ragged and torn is understood the rods and the scourges, the thorns and the nails, the pulling and the dragging, His tender flesh tearing; as I saw in part, the tender flesh was torn from the skull, falling in pieces until the time the bleeding stopped, and then it began to dry again, clinging to the bone. And by the wallowing and writhing, groaning and moaning, is understood that He could never rise in all His might from the time He had fallen into the maiden's womb until His body was slain and dead, and He yielded the soul into the Father's hand, with all mankind for whom He was sent.

And at this point He first began to show His might, for then He went into hell; and when He was there, He raised up the great root out of the deep depths, which was rightfully knit to Him in high heaven. The body lay in the grave until Easter morning; and from that time He never lay down again; for then the wallowing and the writhing, the groaning and the moaning, were rightfully ended. And our foul mortal flesh, which God's Son took upon Himself, which was Adam's old tunic, tight, threadbare and short, was then made by our Savior fair, new, white and bright, and of endless cleanness, full and long, fairer and richer than the clothing I saw on the Father; for that clothing was blue, and Christ's clothing is now of a fair, becoming mixture, so marvelous that I cannot describe it, for it is all of true honor.

Now the lord does not sit on the earth in the wilderness, but sits on his rich and noble seat, which he made in heaven most to his delight. Now the Son does not stand before the Father as a servant before the lord, in dread, and so clothed that He was partly naked; but He stands directly in front of the Father, richly clothed in blissful fullness, with a crown upon His head of precious richness. For it was shown that we are His crown, and this crown is the Father's joy, the Son's honor, the Holy Spirit's delight, and endless, marvelous bliss to all who are in heaven. Now the Son does not stand before the Father on the left side as a laborer, but He sits at the Father's right hand in endless rest and peace. But it is not meant that the Son sits at the right hand, beside Him, as one man sits by another in this life; for there is no such sitting in the Trinity, as I see it. He sits at His Father's right hand, that is to say, right in the highest nobility of the Father's joy. Now the spouse, God's Son, is in peace with His beloved wife, who is the fair maiden of endless joy. Now the Son, true God and true man, sits in His city in rest and in peace, which His Father has prepared for Him by His endless purpose; and the Father in the Son; and the Holy Spirit in the Father and in the Son.

Chapter 52: Father, Mother, Brother, Spouse

And so I saw that God rejoices that He is our Father, and God rejoices that He is our Mother; and God rejoices that He is our true Spouse, and our soul His beloved wife; and Christ rejoices that He is our Brother; and Jesus rejoices that He is our Savior. These are five high joys, as I understand it, in which He wants us to rejoice, praising Him, thanking Him, loving Him, endlessly blessing Him, all of us who shall be saved.

For the time of this life we have in us a marvelous mixture both of weal and of woe. We have in us our Lord Jesus Christ risen; and we have in us the wretchedness and the misfortune of Adam's falling and dying. By Christ we are steadfastly kept; and by His gracious touching we are raised into true trust of salvation. And by Adam's falling we are so broken in our feeling, in various ways, by sin and by sundry pains, in which we are made dark, and so blind, that we can scarcely take any comfort. But in our intent we wait for God, and faithfully trust to have mercy and grace. And this is His own working in us; and of His goodness He opens the eye of our understanding, by which we have sight, sometimes more and sometimes less, as God gives us the ability to receive it. And now we are raised into the one, and now we are allowed to fall into the other.

And this mixture in us is so marvelous that we scarcely know, of our self or of our fellow Christians, in what way we stand, for the marvelousness of these sundry feelings; except for each holy assent that we give to God when we feel Him, truly willing to be with Him with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our might. And then we hate and despise our evil stirrings, and all that might be an occasion of sin, spiritual and bodily. And yet, nevertheless, when this sweetness is hidden, we fall again into blindness, and so into woe and tribulation in various ways. But then this is our comfort: that we know in our faith that by the power of Christ, who is our keeper, we never assent to it; but we complain against it, and endure in pain and in woe, praying until the time that He shows Himself to us again.

And in this way we stand in this mixture all the days of our life. But He wants us to trust that He is lastingly with us, and that in three ways. He is with us in heaven, true man, in His own person, drawing us up; and that was shown in the spiritual thirst. And He is with us on earth, leading us; and that was shown in the Third, where I saw God in a point. And He is with us in our soul, endlessly dwelling, ruling and guiding us; and that was shown in the Sixteenth, as I shall tell.

And so in the servant was shown the blindness and the misfortune of Adam's falling; and in the servant was shown the wisdom and the goodness of God's Son. And in the lord was shown the compassion and the pity of Adam's woe; and in the lord was shown the high nobility and the endless honor that mankind has come to by the power of the Passion and the death of His most dear Son. And therefore He rejoices mightily in the servant's falling, for the high raising and the fullness of bliss that mankind has come to, surpassing what we would have had if he had not fallen. And it was to see this surpassing nobility that my understanding was led into God, at the same time that I saw the servant fall.

And so we have cause for mourning, for our sin is the cause of Christ's pains; and we have lasting cause for joy, for endless love made Him suffer. And therefore the creature that sees and feels the working of love by grace hates nothing but sin; for of all things, as I see it, love and hate are the hardest and most immeasurable contraries. And notwithstanding all this, I saw and understood in our Lord's meaning that we cannot in this life keep ourselves from sin, all holy in full cleanness, as we shall be in heaven. But we can well keep ourselves by grace from the sins that would lead us to endless pain, as Holy Church teaches us, and avoid venial sins reasonably, as far as we are able. And if at any time we fall, by our blindness and our wretchedness, we should rise quickly, knowing the sweet touching of grace, and willingly amend ourselves according to the teaching of Holy Church, as the sin is grievous, and go on with God in love; and neither fall too low on the one side, inclining to despair, nor be too reckless on the other, as though we gave it no weight; but humbly know our feebleness, knowing that we cannot stand for the twinkling of an eye except by the keeping of grace, and reverently cling to God, trusting in Him alone.

For God's way of looking is one thing, and man's way of looking is another. For it belongs to man humbly to accuse himself; and it belongs to the proper goodness of our Lord God courteously to excuse man. And these are the two parts that were shown in the twofold face with which the lord looked on the falling of his beloved servant. The one was shown outwardly, most humbly and mildly, with great compassion and pity; and the other was of inward, endless love. And just so our good Lord wants us to accuse ourselves willingly, and truly see and know the everlasting love that He has for us, and His plentiful mercy. And graciously to see and know both together in this way is the humble accusing that our good Lord asks of us; and He Himself works it where it is. And this is the lower part of man's life; and it was shown in the outward face, in which showing I saw two parts: the one is the pitiful falling of man; the other is the honorable amends that our Lord has made for man.

The other face was shown inwardly; and that was higher, and all one. For the life and the power that we have in the lower part come from the higher, and come down to us from natural love itself, by grace. Between the one and the other there is nothing at all; for it is all one love, and this one blessed love now has a twofold working in us. For in the lower part are pains and passions, compassions and pities, mercies and forgiveness, and other such things, which are profitable. But in the higher part are none of these, but all one high love and marvelous joy, in which marvelous joy all pains are wholly destroyed. And in this our good Lord showed not only our excusing, but also the honorable nobility that He shall bring us to, turning all our blame into endless honor.

Chapter 53: Knit to God

And so I saw that He wants us to know that He takes the falling of any creature that shall be saved no harder than He took the falling of Adam, who, we know, was endlessly loved and surely kept in the time of all his need, and is now blissfully restored in high, surpassing joys. For our Lord God is so good, so gentle and so courteous that He can never assign final fault to those in whom He shall always be blessed and praised.

And by what I have now told, my desire was in part answered, and my great fear somewhat eased, by the lovely, gracious showing of our Lord God. In this showing I saw and understood most surely that in each soul that shall be saved there is a godly will that never assented to sin, and never shall. This will is so good that it can never will evil, but always, continually, it wills good and works good in the sight of God. Therefore our Lord wants us to know it in the faith and the belief; and especially and truly, that we have all this blessed will whole and safe in our Lord Jesus Christ. For each nature that heaven shall be filled with had of necessity, by God's rightfulness, to be so knit and made one in Him that a substance was kept in it which could never, and should never, be parted from Him; and that through His own good will, in His endless foreseeing purpose.

And notwithstanding this rightful knitting and this endless union, the redemption and the buying back of mankind are still needful and profitable in everything, as it is done for the same intent and the same end that Holy Church teaches us in our faith. For I saw that God never began to love mankind. For just as mankind shall be in endless bliss, fulfilling the joy of God with regard to His works, so the same mankind has been in the foresight of God, known and loved from before all beginning in His rightful intent. And by the endless intent and assent, and the full accord of all the Trinity, the Middle Person willed to be the ground and head of this fair nature: out of whom we have all come, in whom we are all enclosed, into whom we shall all go, finding in Him our full heaven in everlasting joy, by the foreseeing purpose of all the blessed Trinity from before all beginning. For before He made us He loved us; and when we were made, we loved Him. And this is a love made of the natural, substantial goodness of the Holy Spirit: mighty in reason, from the might of the Father, and wise in memory, from the wisdom of the Son. And so man's soul is made by God, and at the same moment knit to God.

And so I understood that man's soul is made of nothing; that is to say, it is made, but of nothing that is made. It is like this. When God was to make man's body, He took the clay of the earth, which is a matter mixed and gathered from all bodily things, and from it He made man's body. But for the making of man's soul He would take nothing at all, but simply made it. And so the nature that is made is rightfully made one with the Maker, who is substantial nature unmade, that is, God. And that is why there can and shall be nothing at all between God and man's soul. And in this endless love man's soul is kept whole, as all the matter of the revelation means and shows. In this endless love we are led and kept by God, and never shall be lost; for He wants us to know that our soul is a life, and this life, of His goodness and His grace, shall last in heaven without end, loving Him, thanking Him, praising Him. And just as we shall be without end, so we were treasured in God, and hidden, known and loved from before all beginning.

Therefore He wants us to know that the noblest thing He ever made is mankind; and the fullest substance and the highest power is the blessed soul of Christ. And furthermore He wants us to know that this most dear soul was preciously knit to Him in the making, with a knot so subtle and so mighty that it is made one with God; and in this union it is made endlessly holy. Furthermore He wants us to know that all the souls that shall be saved in heaven without end are knit in this knot, and made one in this union, and made holy in this holiness.

Chapter 54: God in Our Soul

And because of the great endless love that God has for all mankind, He makes no distinction in love between the blessed soul of Christ and the least soul that shall be saved. For it is very easy to believe and trust that the dwelling of the blessed soul of Christ is very high in the glorious Godhead; and truly, as I understood in our Lord's meaning, where the blessed soul of Christ is, there is the substance of all the souls that shall be saved by Christ.

We ought to rejoice highly that God dwells in our soul; and more highly still we ought to rejoice that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is made to be God's dwelling place; and the dwelling place of our soul is God, who is unmade. It is a high understanding to see and know inwardly that God, who is our Maker, dwells in our soul; and it is a higher understanding, and more inward, to see and know that our soul, which is made, dwells in God in substance; and from that substance, by God, we are what we are.

And I saw no difference between God and our substance, but as it were all God; and yet my understanding took it that our substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our substance is a creature in God. For the almighty truth of the Trinity is our Father, for He made us and keeps us in Him; and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, in whom we are enclosed; and the high goodness of the Trinity is our Lord, and in Him we are enclosed, and He in us. We are enclosed in the Father, and we are enclosed in the Son, and we are enclosed in the Holy Spirit. And the Father is enclosed in us, the Son is enclosed in us, and the Holy Spirit is enclosed in us: all might, all wisdom and all goodness, one God, one Lord.

And our faith is a virtue that comes from our natural substance into our sensual soul by the Holy Spirit; and in this virtue all our virtues come to us, for without it no one can receive virtues. For it is nothing else but a right understanding, with true belief and sure trust, of our being: that we are in God, and He in us, whom we do not see. And this virtue, with all the others that God has ordained to come to us with it, works great things in us. For Christ is mercifully working in us, and we are graciously according with Him, through the gift and the power of the Holy Spirit. This working makes us Christ's children, and Christian in our living.

Chapter 55: Christ Our Way

And so Christ is our way, leading us surely in His laws; and Christ in His body mightily bears us up into heaven. For I saw that Christ, having in Him all of us who shall be saved by Him, honorably presents us to His Father in heaven; and His Father receives this present most thankfully, and courteously gives it to His Son, Jesus Christ. This gift and working is joy to the Father, and bliss to the Son, and delight to the Holy Spirit. And of all the things that belong to us, what most delights our Lord is that we rejoice in this joy which is in the blessed Trinity over our salvation. And this was seen in the Ninth Showing, where it speaks more of this matter. And notwithstanding all our feeling, woe or weal, God wants us to understand and believe that we are more truly in heaven than on earth.

Our faith comes from the natural love of our soul, and from the clear light of our reason, and from the steadfast memory that we have of God in our first making. And at the time our soul is breathed into our body, in which we are made sensual, at once mercy and grace begin to work, taking care of us and keeping us with pity and love. In this working the Holy Spirit forms in our faith the hope that we shall come again up above to our substance, into the power of Christ, increased and fulfilled through the Holy Spirit. In this way I understood that the sensuality is grounded in nature, in mercy and in grace, and this ground enables us to receive gifts that lead us to endless life.

For I saw most surely that our substance is in God. And I also saw that God is in our sensuality; for at the same moment that our soul is made sensual, at that same moment the city of God is ordained for Him from before all beginning. He comes into this city, and shall never remove from it; for God is never out of the soul, in which He shall dwell blissfully without end. And this was said in the Sixteenth Showing, where it says, "The place that Jesus takes in our soul He shall never leave." And all the gifts that God can give to the creature He has given to His Son Jesus for us; and these gifts He, dwelling in us, has enclosed in Himself until the time that we have grown and matured, our soul with our body and our body with our soul, each of them taking help from the other, until we are brought up to our full stature, as nature works. And then, in the ground of nature, with the working of mercy, the Holy Spirit graciously breathes into us gifts that lead to endless life.

And so my understanding was led by God to see in Him, and to grasp, to understand and to know, that our soul is a made trinity, like the unmade blessed Trinity, known and loved from before all beginning, and in the making made one with the Maker, as was said before. This sight was most sweet and marvelous to contemplate, peaceful and restful, sure and delightful.

And because of the honorable union that God made in this way between the soul and the body, it had of necessity to be that mankind should be restored from a double death; and that restoring could never be until the time that the Second Person in the Trinity had taken the lower part of mankind, to whom the highest part had been made one in the first making. And these two parts were in Christ, the higher and the lower, which is but one soul. The higher part was always in peace with God, in full joy and bliss; the lower part, which is sensuality, suffered for the salvation of mankind. And these two parts were seen and felt in the Eighth Showing, in which my body was filled with the feeling and the memory of Christ's Passion and His dying. And furthermore, with this there was a subtle feeling and a secret inward sight of the high part; and that was shown at the same time, when I could not, for the suggestion offered me, look up into heaven. And that was because of that same mighty contemplating of the inward life; and this inward life is that high substance, that precious soul, which is endlessly rejoicing in the Godhead.

Chapter 56: Easier to Know God Than Our Own Soul

And so I saw most surely that it is readier for us, and easier, to come to the knowing of God than to know our own soul. For our soul is so deeply grounded in God, and so endlessly treasured, that we cannot come to the knowing of it until we first have knowing of God, who is the Maker to whom it is made one. But nevertheless I saw that we have it by nature, for our fullness, to desire wisely and truly to know our own soul; and by this we are taught to seek it where it is, and that is in God. And so, by the gracious leading of the Holy Spirit, we shall know them both in one. Whether we are stirred to know God or our soul, it is both good and true.

God is nearer to us than our own soul; for He is the ground in whom our soul stands, and He is the intermediary who keeps the substance and the sensuality together, so that they shall never part. For our soul sits in God in true rest, and our soul stands in God in sure strength, and our soul is rooted by nature in God in endless love. And therefore if we want to have knowledge of our soul, and communion and converse with it, we must seek into our Lord God, in whom it is enclosed. And of this enclosing I saw and understood more in the Sixteenth Showing, as I shall tell.

And as for our substance, it may rightly be called our soul; and as for our sensuality, it may rightly be called our soul; and that is by the union that it has in God. That honorable city in which our Lord Jesus sits is our sensuality, in which He is enclosed; and our natural substance is enclosed in Jesus, with the blessed soul of Christ sitting in rest in the Godhead.

And I saw most surely that it must needs be that we should be in longing and in penance until the time that we are led so deep into God that we really and truly know our own soul. And surely I saw that our good Lord Himself leads us into this high depth in the same love with which He made us, and in the same love with which He bought us by mercy and grace, through the power of His blessed Passion. And notwithstanding all this, we can never come to the full knowing of God until we first clearly know our own soul. For until the time that it is in its full powers, we cannot be all holy; and that is, until our sensuality, by the power of Christ's Passion, is brought up into the substance, with all the profits of our tribulation that our Lord shall make us gain by mercy and grace.

I had in part a touching of this, and it is grounded in nature; that is to say, our reason is grounded in God, who is substantial nature. From this substantial nature mercy and grace spring and spread into us, working all things for the fulfilling of our joy. These are our grounds, in which we have our being, our increase and our fulfilling; for in nature we have our life and our being, and in mercy and grace we have our increase and our fulfilling. These are three properties in one goodness; and where one works, all work, in the things that belong to us. God wants us to understand this, desiring with all our heart and with all our strength to have knowing of them more and more, until the time we are fulfilled. For fully to know them, and clearly to see them, is nothing else but the endless joy and bliss that we shall have in heaven, which God wants us to begin here in knowing His love. For by our reason alone we cannot profit, unless we have memory and love equally with it; nor can we be saved only in the natural ground that we have in God, unless we have, coming from the same ground, mercy and grace. For from these three workings together we receive all our goods; and of these the first are the goods of nature. For in our first making God gave us as much good, and as great good, as we could receive in our spirit alone; but His foreseeing purpose, in His endless wisdom, willed that we should be twofold.

Chapter 57: Substance and Sensuality

And as regards our substance, He made us so noble and so rich that we always work His will and His honor. When I say "we", it means mankind that shall be saved. For truly I saw that we are what He loves, and do what pleases Him, lastingly, without any stopping. And from this come great riches, and from this come high and noble virtues, by measure, to our soul at the time that it is knit to our body, in which knitting we are made sensual. And so in our substance we are full, and in our sensuality we fail; and this failing God will restore and fulfill by the working of mercy and grace, flowing plentifully into us from His own natural goodness. And so this natural goodness makes mercy and grace work in us; and the natural goodness that we have from Him enables us to receive the working of mercy and grace.

I saw that our nature is whole in God; and in it He makes diversities flowing out of Him to work His will, which nature keeps, and mercy and grace restore and fulfill. And of these none shall perish. For our nature, which is the higher part, is knit to God in the making; and God is knit to our nature, which is the lower part, in His taking of flesh. And so in Christ our two natures are made one. For the Trinity is comprehended in Christ, in whom our higher part is grounded and rooted; and our lower part the Second Person has taken, and this nature was first made ready for Him. For I saw most truly that all the works God has done, or ever shall do, were fully known to Him and foreseen from before all beginning. And for love He made mankind, and for the same love He Himself would become man.

The next good that we receive is our faith, in which our profiting begins. It comes from the high riches of our natural substance into our sensual soul; and it is grounded in us, and we in it, through the natural goodness of God, by the working of mercy and grace. And from it come all our goods, by which we are led and saved. For the commandments of God come in it, and in them we ought to have two kinds of understanding. The one is that we ought to understand and know which are His biddings, to love them and to keep them. The other is that we ought to know His forbiddings, to hate them and to refuse them. For in these two all our working is comprehended. Also in our faith come the seven sacraments, each following the other in order as God has ordained them for us, and every kind of virtue. For the same virtues that we have received from our substance, given to us in nature by the goodness of God, the same virtues by the working of mercy are given to us in grace through the Holy Spirit, renewed; and these virtues and gifts are treasured up for us in Jesus Christ. For at the same time that God knit Himself to our body in the maiden's womb, He took our sensual soul; and in this taking, having enclosed us all in Himself, He made it one with our substance. In this union He was perfect man; for Christ, having knit in Himself every man that shall be saved, is perfect man.

And so our Lady is our mother, in whom we are all enclosed, and born of her in Christ; for she who is mother of our Savior is mother of all who are saved in our Savior. And our Savior is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born, and we shall never come out of Him. Plentifully, fully and sweetly was this shown. And it is spoken of in the First, where it says, "We are all enclosed in Him, and He is enclosed in us"; and it is spoken of in the Sixteenth Showing, where He says, "He sits in our soul." For it is His delight to reign in our understanding blissfully, and to sit in our soul restfully, and to dwell in our soul endlessly, working us all into Himself. In this working He wants us to be His helpers, giving Him all our attention, learning His laws, keeping His teaching, desiring that all be done that He does, truly trusting in Him. For truly I saw that all our substance is in God.

Chapter 58: Our Mother Christ

God, the blissful Trinity, who is everlasting being, just as He is endless from before all beginning, so it was endlessly in His purpose to make mankind. And this fair nature was first made ready for His own Son, the Second Person; and when He willed, by the full accord of all the Trinity, He made us all at once. And in our making He knit us and made us one with Himself; and by this union we are kept as clean and as noble as we were made. By the power of that same precious union we love our Maker, and delight in Him, praise Him and thank Him, and endlessly rejoice in Him. And this is the work that is wrought continually in each soul that shall be saved, which is the godly will spoken of before.

And so in our making God almighty is our natural Father; and God all wisdom is our natural Mother, with the love and the goodness of the Holy Spirit, who is all one God, one Lord. And in the knitting and in the union He is our very true Spouse, and we are His beloved wife and His fair maiden, with whom He was never displeased; for He says, "I love you, and you love me, and our love shall never be parted in two."

I contemplated the working of all the blessed Trinity; and in this contemplating I saw and understood these three properties: the property of the fatherhood, and the property of the motherhood, and the property of the lordship, in one God. In our Father almighty we have our keeping and our bliss, as regards our natural substance, which is ours by our making from before all beginning. And in the Second Person, in understanding and wisdom, we have our keeping, and as regards our sensuality, our restoring and our saving; for He is our Mother, Brother and Savior. And in our good Lord the Holy Spirit we have our rewarding and our recompense for our living and our labor, endlessly surpassing all that we desire, in His marvelous courtesy, of His high, plentiful grace. For all our life is in three: in the first we have our being, and in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our fulfilling. The first is nature, the second is mercy, the third is grace.

For the first, I saw and understood that the high might of the Trinity is our Father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our Lord; and all this we have in nature and in our substantial making. And furthermore I saw that the Second Person, who is our Mother in substance, that same most dear Person has now become our Mother in sensuality; for we are twofold by God's making, that is to say, substantial and sensual. Our substance is the higher part, which we have in our Father, God almighty; and the Second Person of the Trinity is our Mother in nature, in our substantial making, in whom we are grounded and rooted; and He is our Mother of mercy in taking our sensuality. And so our Mother works for us in various ways, and in Him our parts are kept undivided. For in our Mother Christ we profit and increase; and in mercy He reforms us and restores us; and by the power of His Passion, His death and His rising He made us one with our substance. Our Mother works this in mercy for all His beloved children who are yielding and obedient to Him.

And grace works with mercy, and especially in two properties, as it was shown; and this working belongs to the Third Person, the Holy Spirit. He works rewarding and giving. Rewarding is a gift of trust that the Lord makes to those who have labored; and giving is a courteous working which He does freely, of grace, fulfilling and surpassing all that creatures deserve. And so in our Father, God almighty, we have our being; and in our Mother of mercy, Jesus Christ, we have our reforming and our restoring, in whom our parts are made one and all made perfect man; and by the rewarding and the giving in grace of the Holy Spirit we are fulfilled. And our substance is in our Father, God almighty; and our substance is in our Mother, God all wisdom; and our substance is in our Lord God the Holy Spirit, all goodness. For our substance is whole in each Person of the Trinity, who is one God. And our sensuality is only in the Second Person, Christ Jesus, in whom are the Father and the Holy Spirit. And in Him and by Him we are mightily taken out of hell and out of the wretchedness on earth, and honorably brought up into heaven, and blissfully made one with our substance, increased in riches and nobility by all the power of Christ, and by the grace and working of the Holy Spirit.

Chapter 59: Jesus Our True Mother

And all this bliss we have by mercy and grace; and this kind of bliss we could never have had and known unless that property of goodness which is in God had been opposed, and by that we have this bliss. For wickedness has been allowed to rise up against that goodness; and the goodness of mercy and grace rose against that wickedness, and turned all to goodness and honor for all who shall be saved. For it is that property in God which does good against evil. And so Jesus Christ, who does good against evil, is our true Mother. We have our being from Him, where the ground of motherhood begins, with all the sweet keeping of love that endlessly follows. As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. And He showed that in everything, and especially in these sweet words where He says, "I am He"; that is to say, "I am He, the might and the goodness of the fatherhood; I am He, the wisdom and the kindness of the motherhood; I am He, the light and the grace that is all blessed love; I am He, the Trinity; I am He, the unity; I am He, the high sovereign goodness of all manner of thing; I am He who makes you long; I am He, the endless fulfilling of all true desires."

For there, where the soul is highest, noblest and most honored, it is yet lowest, humblest and mildest. And from this substantial ground we have all our virtues in our sensuality, by the gift of nature, and by the help and furthering of mercy and grace, without which we cannot profit.

Our high Father, almighty God, who is being, knew us and loved us from before any time. And from this knowing, in His most marvelous deep charity, by the foreseeing endless counsel of all the blessed Trinity, He willed that the Second Person should become our Mother, our Brother and our Savior. From this it follows that as truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. Our Father wills, our Mother works, our good Lord the Holy Spirit confirms. And therefore it belongs to us to love our God, in whom we have our being, reverently thanking and praising Him for our making, mightily praying to our Mother for mercy and pity, and to our Lord the Holy Spirit for help and grace. For in these three is all our life, nature, mercy and grace; and from them we have mildness, patience and pity, and hatred of sin and wickedness; for it belongs properly to virtue to hate sin and wickedness.

And so Jesus is our true Mother in nature, by our first making; and He is our true Mother in grace, by His taking of our made nature. All the fair working, and all the sweet natural offices of most dear motherhood, are made the property of the Second Person; for in Him we have this godly will whole and safe without end, both in nature and in grace, of His own proper goodness. I understood three ways of contemplating motherhood in God. The first is the ground of our natural making. The second is His taking of our nature, and there the motherhood of grace begins. The third is motherhood in working; and in this there is a spreading forth, by the same grace, of length and breadth, of height and of depth without end; and all is one love.

Chapter 60: The Mother Who Feeds Us with Himself

But now I must look a little further into this spreading forth, as I understood it in the meaning of our Lord: how we are brought back by the motherhood of mercy and grace into our natural place, where we were made by the motherhood of natural love; and this natural love never leaves us.

Our natural Mother, our gracious Mother, because He wanted to become our Mother wholly in all things, took the ground of His work most low and most mildly in the maiden's womb. And He showed that in the First, where He brought the humble maiden before the eye of my understanding in the simple stature she had when she conceived. That is to say, our high God is the sovereign wisdom of all; and in this low place He arrayed Himself and made Himself all ready in our poor flesh, to do Himself the service and the office of motherhood in all things.

The mother's service is nearest, readiest and surest: nearest, for it is most of nature; readiest, for it is most of love; and surest, for it is most of truth. This office no one might or could or ever did do to the full but He alone. We know that all our mothers bear us to pain and to dying. But what is that? Our true Mother Jesus, He alone bears us to joy and to endless living, blessed may He be. In this way He sustained us within Himself in love and labor, until the full time when He was willing to suffer the sharpest throes and the most grievous pains that ever were or ever shall be, and died at the last. And when He had done it, and so borne us to bliss, yet all this could not satisfy His marvelous love. And He showed that in these high, surpassing words of love: "If I could suffer more, I would suffer more."

He could die no more, but He would not stop working. Therefore He must provide for us, for the most dear love of motherhood has made Him our debtor. The mother can give her child her milk to suck; but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with Himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed sacrament, which is the precious food of true life; and with all the sweet sacraments He sustains us most mercifully and graciously. And this is what He meant in these blessed words, where He said, "I am He whom Holy Church preaches to you and teaches you"; that is to say, "All the health and the life of the sacraments, all the power and the grace of my word, all the goodness that is ordained in Holy Church for you, I am He."

The mother can lay her child tenderly to her breast; but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us familiarly into His blessed breast through His sweet open side, and show us there part of the Godhead and the joys of heaven, with spiritual sureness of endless bliss. And He showed that in the Tenth Revelation, giving the same understanding in this sweet word where He says, "Look how I loved you," looking into His blessed side, rejoicing.

This fair, lovely word Mother is so sweet and so natural in itself that it cannot truly be said of anyone, or to anyone, but of Him and to Him who is the true Mother of life and of all. To the property of motherhood belong natural love, wisdom and knowing; and it is God. For though it is true that our bodily bringing forth is only little, low and simple compared with our spiritual bringing forth, yet it is He who does it in the creatures by whom it is done. The natural, loving mother, who knows the need of her child, keeps it most tenderly, as the nature and condition of motherhood require. And always, as it grows in age and in stature, she changes what she does, but not her love. And when it has grown older, she allows it to be chastised, to break down its vices, to make the child receive virtues and grace. This working, with all that is fair and good, our Lord does in those by whom it is done. And so He is our Mother in nature, by the working of grace in the lower part, for love of the higher. And He wants us to know it; for He wants to have all our love fastened to Him. And in this I saw that every debt we owe by God's bidding to fatherhood and motherhood is fulfilled in truly loving God, and this blessed love Christ works in us. And this was shown in everything, and especially in the high, plentiful words where He says, "I am He whom you love."

Chapter 61: A Mother Lets the Child Fall

And in our spiritual bringing forth He uses more tenderness in keeping us, beyond any comparison, by as much as our soul is of more worth in His sight. He kindles our understanding, He prepares our ways, He eases our conscience, He comforts our soul, He lightens our heart, and gives us in part knowing and loving of His blissful Godhead, with gracious memory of His sweet manhood and His blessed Passion, and with courteous marveling at His high, surpassing goodness; and He makes us love all that He loves, for His love, and be well pleased with Him and with all His works. And when we fall, He quickly raises us by His loving embrace and His gracious touching. And when we are strengthened by His sweet working, then by His grace we willingly choose Him, to be His servants and His lovers, lastingly without end.

And yet after this He allows some of us to fall harder and more grievously than ever we did before, as it seems to us. And then we, who are not all wise, suppose that all we have begun is worth nothing. But it is not so. For we need to fall, and we need to see it. For if we did not fall, we would not know how feeble and how wretched we are of our self, nor would we know so fully the marvelous love of our Maker. For we shall truly see in heaven without end that we have grievously sinned in this life; and notwithstanding this, we shall truly see that we were never hurt in His love, nor were we ever of less worth in His sight. And by the trial of this falling we shall have a high and marvelous knowing of love in God without end; for firm and marvelous is that love which cannot and will not be broken for trespass. And this was one understanding of the profit. Another is the lowliness and humility that we shall gain by the sight of our falling; for by it we shall be highly raised in heaven, and to that rising we could never have come without that humility. And therefore we needed to see it; and if we do not see it, though we feel it, it would not profit us. And commonly we fall first, and afterward we see it; and both are of the mercy of God.

The mother may allow the child to fall sometimes, and to be hurt in various ways, for its own profit; but she can never allow any kind of peril to come to her child, for love. And though our earthly mother may allow her child to perish, our heavenly Mother Jesus can never allow us who are His children to perish; for He is all might, all wisdom and all love, and so is none but He, blessed may He be.

But often, when our falling and our wretchedness are shown to us, we are so sorely afraid, and so greatly ashamed of our self, that we scarcely know where we can hold ourselves. But then our courteous Mother does not want us to flee away, for nothing would be more hateful to Him. But He wants us then to behave as a child does; for when it is hurt and afraid, it runs quickly to its mother, and if it can do no more, it cries out to the mother for help with all its might. In the same way He wants us to do as the humble child does, saying this: "My natural Mother, my gracious Mother, my most dear Mother, have mercy on me. I have made myself foul and unlike You, and I neither may nor can amend it except with Your help and grace." And if we do not feel ourselves eased at once, let us be sure that He is behaving as a wise mother does. For if He sees that it is for our profit to mourn and to weep, He allows it, with compassion and pity, until the best time, for love. And He wants us then to have the property of a child, which always trusts by nature in the love of its mother, in weal and in woe.

And He wants us to take ourselves mightily to the faith of Holy Church, and find there our most dear Mother, in solace and true understanding, with all the blessed communion. For one single person may often be broken, as it seems to himself, but the whole body of Holy Church was never broken, and never shall be, without end. And therefore it is a sure thing, a good and a gracious thing, to will humbly and mightily to be fastened and made one with our Mother Holy Church, that is, Christ Jesus. For the flood of mercy, which is His most dear blood and precious water, is plentiful to make us fair and clean. The blessed wounds of our Savior are open, and rejoice to heal us. The sweet, gracious hands of our Mother are ready and diligent about us; for in all this working He takes on the very office of a nurse true to her nature, who has nothing else to do but attend to the salvation of her child. It is His office to save us; it is His honor to do it; and it is His will that we know it; for He wants us to love Him sweetly, and trust in Him humbly and mightily. And He showed this in these gracious words: "I keep you most surely."

Chapter 62: Our Frailty and His Keeping

For at that time He showed our frailty and our fallings, our breakings and our being brought to nothing, the contempt we suffer and the burdens we bear, and all our woe, as far as it seemed to me that it might befall in this life. And with it He showed His blessed might, His blessed wisdom, His blessed love: that He keeps us in this time as tenderly and as sweetly, to His honor, and as surely, to our salvation, as He does when we are in the most solace and comfort; and moreover He raises us spiritually and highly in heaven, and turns it all to His honor and to our joy without end. For in His precious love He never allows us to lose time. And all this is of the natural goodness of God, by the working of grace.

God is nature in His being; that is to say, the goodness that is nature, it is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the very thing that is nature itself; and He is the true Father and the true Mother of natures. And all the natures that He has made to flow out of Him to work His will shall be restored and brought back into Him by the salvation of man, through the working of grace. For of all the natures that He has set in various creatures, each in part, in man is the whole of them, in fullness and in power, in fairness and in goodness, in royalty and in nobility, in every kind of majesty, of preciousness and of honor. Here we can see that we are all bound to God for nature, and we are bound to God for grace. Here we can see that we have no great need to seek far afield to know the various natures, but only to Holy Church, into our Mother's breast, that is to say, into our own soul, where our Lord dwells; and there we shall find everything, now in faith and in understanding, and afterward truly in Himself, clearly, in bliss. But let no man or woman take this as belonging to himself alone; for it is not so: it is general. For it is our precious Mother Christ, and for Him this fair nature was made ready, for the honor and the nobility of man's making, and for the joy and the bliss of man's salvation, just as He saw, understood and knew it from before all beginning.

Chapter 63: Nature, Grace and the Child

Here we can see that we truly have it by nature to hate sin, and we truly have it by grace to hate sin. For nature is all good and fair in itself; and grace was sent out to save nature and keep nature, and destroy sin, and bring fair nature back again to the blessed point from which it came, that is, God, with more nobility and honor by the powerful working of grace. For it shall be seen before God, by all His holy ones, in joy without end, that nature has been tried in the fire of tribulation, and in it no lack and no fault were found. And so nature and grace are of one accord; for grace is God, as unmade nature is God. He is two in His manner of working, and one in love; and neither of them works without the other, nor are they parted.

And when we, by the mercy of God and with His help, bring ourselves into accord with nature and grace, we shall truly see that sin is worse, viler and more painful than hell, beyond any comparison; for it is contrary to our fair nature. For just as truly as sin is unclean, so truly is sin unnatural. And it is a horrible thing to see, for the loving soul that would be all fair and shining in the sight of God, as nature and grace teach. But let us not be afraid of this, except in so far as fear may help us; but let us humbly make our moan to our most dear Mother, and He shall sprinkle us all over with His precious blood, and make our soul most soft and most mild, and heal us most fairly in the course of time, just as is most honor to Him and joy to us without end. And of this sweet, fair working He shall never cease or stop until all His most dear children are brought forth and born. And He showed that where He gave the understanding of the spiritual thirst, that is, the love-longing that shall last until Judgment Day.

And so our life is grounded in our true Mother Jesus, in His own foreseeing wisdom from before all beginning, with the high might of the Father and the sovereign goodness of the Holy Spirit. And in the taking of our nature He gave us life; and in His blessed dying on the cross He bore us to endless life. And from that time, and now, and always until Judgment Day, He feeds us and furthers us, just as the high sovereign kindness of motherhood wills, and as the natural need of childhood asks. Fair and sweet is our heavenly Mother Jesus in the sight of our soul; precious and lovely are the gracious children in the sight of our heavenly Mother, with mildness and humility, and all the fair virtues that belong to children by nature. For by nature the child does not despair of its mother's love; by nature the child does not presume upon itself; by nature the child loves its mother, and each of the children loves the others. These are fair virtues, with all the others like them, with which our heavenly Mother is served and pleased. And I understood no higher stature in this life than childhood, in feebleness and failing of might and of wit, until the time our gracious Mother has brought us up into our Father's bliss. And there His meaning shall truly be made known to us, in the sweet words where He says, "All shall be well, and you shall see for yourself that all manner of thing shall be well."

And then the bliss of our motherhood in Christ shall begin anew in the joys of our Father God, and this new beginning shall last without end, beginning anew. And so I understood that all His blessed children, who have come out of Him by nature, shall be brought back into Him by grace.

Chapter 64: Suddenly You Shall Be Taken

Before this time I had a great longing and desire, by God's gift, to be delivered from this world and from this life; for I often looked at the woe that is here, and at the weal and the blessed being that is there. And if there had been no pain in this life but the absence of our Lord, it seemed to me at times that this was more than I could bear. And this made me mourn and long eagerly. And also, because of my own wretchedness, sloth and weariness, it did not please me to live and to labor as it fell to me to do.

And to all this our courteous Lord answered, for comfort and patience, and said these words: "Suddenly you shall be taken from all your pain, from all your sickness, from all your distress and from all your woe. And you shall come up above, and you shall have me as your reward, and you shall be filled with joy and bliss; and you shall never again have any kind of pain, any kind of sickness, any kind of displeasure, any lack of your will, but always joy and bliss without end. Why then should it grieve you to suffer for a while, since it is my will and my honor?"

And in these words, "Suddenly you shall be taken," I saw that God rewards man for the patience he has in waiting for God's will and for His time, and that man stretches his patience over the whole time of his living, because he does not know the time of his passing. This is a great profit; for if a man knew his time, he would not have patience beyond that time. And God also wants the soul, while it is in the body, to seem to itself always to be at the point of being taken; for all this life, and this longing that we have here, is only a point. And when we are taken suddenly out of pain into bliss, then pain shall be nothing.

And at this time I saw a body lying on the earth, a body that looked heavy and fearful, without shape or form, as if it were a swollen bog of stinking mire. And suddenly out of this body sprang a most fair creature, a little child, fully shaped and formed, swift and lively, and whiter than the lily, which glided swiftly up into heaven. The swollenness of the body signifies the great wretchedness of our mortal flesh, and the littleness of the child signifies the cleanness and the purity of our soul. And I thought: "With this body there remains none of the fairness of this child, and on this child there rests none of the foulness of this body."

It is a more blissful thing for man to be taken from pain than for pain to be taken from man; for if pain is taken from us, it may come again. Therefore this is a sovereign comfort, and a blissful contemplation in a longing soul, that we shall be taken from pain. For in this promise I saw a merciful compassion that our Lord has for us in our woe, and a courteous promise of clear deliverance; for He wants us to be comforted in the joy that surpasses all. And He showed that in these words: "And you shall come up above, and you shall have me as your reward, and you shall be filled with joy and bliss."

It is God's will that we set the point of our thought on this blissful contemplation as often as we can, and keep ourselves in it as long as we can with His grace; for this is a blissful contemplation for the soul that is led by God, and very much to His honor for the time that it lasts. And when we fall back into ourselves, through heaviness and spiritual blindness, and the feeling of pains spiritual and bodily, by our frailty, it is God's will that we know that He has not forgotten us. And this is what He means in these words, which He says for comfort: "And you shall never again have pain of any kind, nor any kind of sickness, any kind of displeasure, any lack of your will, but always joy and bliss without end. Why then should it grieve you to suffer for a while, since it is my will and my honor?"

It is God's will that we take His promises and His comforts as largely and as mightily as we can take them. And He also wants us to take our waiting and our distresses as lightly as we can take them, and to count them as nothing; for the more lightly we take them, and the less value we set on them, for love, the less pain we shall have in the feeling of them, and the more thanks and reward we shall have for them.

Chapter 65: Loved Without End

And so I understood that any man or woman who willingly chooses God in this life, for love, may be sure that he is loved without end, with an endless love that works that grace in him. For He wants us to hold to this trustingly: that we are as sure in hope of the bliss of heaven while we are here as we shall be in certainty when we are there. And the more delight and joy we take in this sureness, with reverence and humility, the better it pleases Him. For, as it was shown, this reverence that I mean is a holy, courteous dread of our Lord, to which humility is knit; and that is, that a creature sees the Lord marvelously great and herself marvelously little. For these virtues are had endlessly by those whom God loves. And this may now be seen and felt in measure through the gracious presence of our Lord, when it is there: a presence that is most desired in all things, for it works that marvelous sureness in true faith, and sure hope through greatness of charity, in a dread that is sweet and delightful.

It is God's will that I see myself as much bound to Him in love as if He had done for me alone all that He has done. And this is how every soul should think of His love; that is to say, the charity of God makes in us such a unity that, when it is truly seen, no man can part himself from another. And so each soul ought to think that God has done for it all that He has done.

And He shows this to make us love Him, and delight in Him, and fear nothing but Him; for it is His will that we know that all the might of our enemies is locked in our Friend's hands. And therefore the soul that knows this surely shall fear nothing but Him whom it loves. All other fears it sets among passions, and bodily sickness, and imaginings. And therefore, though we are in so much pain, woe and distress that it seems to us we can think of nothing at all but what we are in, or what we feel, as soon as we can, let us pass over it lightly and count it as nothing. And why? Because God wants to be known; for if we know Him, and love Him, and reverently dread Him, we shall have patience and be in great rest, and all that He does will be a great delight to us. And our Lord showed this in these words: "Why then should it grieve you to suffer for a while, since it is my will and my honor?"

Now I have told you of fifteen showings, as God granted to bring them to my mind, renewed by lightings and touchings, I hope, of the same Spirit that showed them all. Of these fifteen showings, the first began early in the morning, about the hour of four; and it lasted, showing in order, most fair and steadily, each following the other, until it was noon of the day, or past.

Chapter 66: I Said I Had Raved

And after this the good Lord showed the Sixteenth Revelation on the following night, as I shall tell later; and this Sixteenth was the conclusion and confirmation of all the fifteen. But first I must tell you about my feebleness, wretchedness and blindness. I said at the beginning, where it says, "And at that moment all my pain was suddenly taken from me," that I had no grief or distress from that pain as long as the fifteen showings went on showing. And at the end all was closed, and I saw no more; and soon I felt that I would live longer. And at once my sickness came back, first in my head with a sound and a noise; and suddenly all my body was filled with sickness as it had been before. And I was as barren and as dry as if I had never had more than a little comfort; and like a wretch I mourned heavily, for feeling my bodily pains and for lack of comfort, spiritual and bodily.

Then a man of religion came to me and asked me how I was; and I said I had raved that day, and he laughed loud and heartily. And I said, "The cross that stood before my face, it seemed to me that it bled fast." And at this word the person I was speaking to grew very serious and marveled. And at once I was sorely ashamed, and dismayed at my carelessness. And I thought, "This man takes seriously the least word I can say," and I said no more of it. And when I saw that he took it so seriously, and with such great reverence, I grew very greatly ashamed, and wanted to be shriven; but I could tell it to no priest, for I thought, "How should a priest believe me, when by saying I raved I showed that I did not believe our Lord God?" Even so, I believed Him truly for the time that I saw Him; and it was then my will and my intention to do so forever without end; but like a fool I let it pass out of my mind. Ah, look how wretched I was! This was a great sin and a great unnaturalness, that through the folly of feeling a little bodily pain I so unwisely let go, for the time, the comfort of all this blessed showing of our Lord God. Here you may see what I am of myself. But even in this our courteous Lord would not leave me. And I lay still until night, trusting in His mercy; and then I began to sleep.

And in my sleep, at the beginning, it seemed to me that the fiend set himself at my throat, putting out a face very near my own, like a young man's; and it was long and wondrously lean; I never saw one like it. The color was red like a tile when it is newly fired, with black spots in it like freckles, fouler than the tile. His hair was red as unscoured rust, with side locks hanging down in front in hanks. He grinned at me with a wicked look and showed me white teeth, and for that it seemed to me all the more ugly. Body or hands he had none worth the name; but with his paws he held me by the throat, and would have stopped my breath and killed me, but he could not. This ugly showing was made while I slept, and none of the others was. And in all this time I trusted to be saved and kept by the mercy of God. And our courteous Lord gave me grace to wake, and I had scarcely any life in me. The people who were with me looked at me and wet my temples, and my heart began to take comfort. And at once a little smoke came in at the door, with a great heat and a foul stench; and then I said, "Benedicite Dominus! Is everything here on fire?" And I supposed it was a bodily fire that would burn us all to death. I asked those who were with me whether they smelled any stench. They said no, they smelled none. I said, "Blessed be God!" for then I knew well that it was the fiend, who had come only to tempt me. And at once I took myself to what our Lord had shown me on that same day, with all the faith of Holy Church, for I saw them as both one, and fled to it as to my comfort. And at once it all vanished away, and I was brought to great rest and peace, without sickness of body or dread of conscience.

Chapter 67: The City in the Soul

And then our good Lord opened my spiritual eye and showed me my soul in the middle of my heart. I saw the soul as large as if it were an endless world, and also as if it were a blessed kingdom. And by the conditions I saw in it, I understood that it is an honorable city. In the middle of that city sits our Lord Jesus, true God and true man, a fair person and of large stature, highest Bishop, most majestic King, most honorable Lord. And I saw Him clothed majestically in honor; He sits in the soul, upright, in peace and rest. And He rules and governs heaven and earth and all that is. The manhood with the Godhead sits in rest; the Godhead rules and governs without any instrument or effort. And the soul is wholly taken up with the blessed Godhead, which is sovereign might, sovereign wisdom and sovereign goodness. The place that Jesus takes in our soul He shall never leave, without end, as I see it; for in us is His most familiar home and His endless dwelling.

And in this He shows the delight He has in the making of man's soul; for as well as the Father could make a creature, and as well as the Son could make a creature, so well did the Holy Spirit will that man's soul be made; and so it was done. And therefore the blessed Trinity rejoices without end in the making of man's soul; for He saw from before all beginning what would please Him without end. Everything He has made shows His lordship, as understanding was given at the same time by the example of a creature that is led to see great nobility, and kingdoms belonging to a lord; and when it had seen all the nobility below, then, marveling, it was stirred to seek up above, to the high place where the lord dwells, knowing by reason that his dwelling is in the worthiest place. And so I understand truly that our soul can never have rest in things that are beneath itself. And when it comes above all creatures into itself, still it cannot stay in contemplating itself; but all its contemplating is blissfully set on God, who is the Maker dwelling in it; for in man's soul is His true dwelling. And the highest light and the brightest shining of the city is the glorious love of our Lord God, as I see it.

And what can make us rejoice more in God than to see in Him that He rejoices in us, the highest of all His works? For I saw in the same showing that if the blessed Trinity could have made man's soul any better, any fairer, any nobler than it was made, He would not have been fully pleased with the making of man's soul; but because He made man's soul as fair, as good and as precious as He could make it as a creature, therefore the blessed Trinity is fully pleased without end in the making of man's soul. And He wants our hearts to be mightily raised above the depths of the earth and all vain sorrows, and to rejoice in Him.

Chapter 68: You Shall Not Be Overcome

This was a delightful sight, and a restful showing that has no end; and contemplating this while we are here is most pleasing to God and a very great help to us. And the soul that contemplates in this way is made like Him who is contemplated, and made one with Him in rest and in peace by His grace. And it was a singular joy and bliss to me that I saw Him sitting; for the steadfastness of sitting showed endless dwelling. And He gave me to know truly that it was He who had shown me everything before. And when I had contemplated all this with care, then our good Lord showed words most humbly, without voice and without opening of lips, just as He had done before, and said most sweetly: "Know it well now: it was no raving that you saw today. But take it and believe it, and keep yourself in it, and comfort yourself with it, and trust in it, and you shall not be overcome."

These last words were said to teach me full and true sureness that it is our Lord Jesus who showed me everything. And just as in the first word our good Lord showed, meaning His blessed Passion, "With this the fiend is overcome," so He said in the last word, with most true faithfulness, meaning us all: "You shall not be overcome." And all this teaching and this true comfort is for all my fellow Christians in general, as has been said before; and so is God's will. And this word, "You shall not be overcome," was said most sharply and most mightily, for sureness and comfort against all the tribulations that may come. He did not say, "You shall not be troubled, you shall not be wearied, you shall not be distressed"; but He said, "You shall not be overcome." God wants us to take heed of this word, and to be always mighty in faithful trust, in weal and woe; for He loves us and delights in us, and so He wants us to love Him and delight in Him, and mightily trust in Him; and all shall be well. And soon all was closed, and I saw no more after this.

Chapter 69: The Fiend Comes Back

The fiend came again with his heat and with his stench, and kept me very busy. The stench was so vile and so painful, and the bodily heat also fearsome and wearing. I also heard a bodily talking, as if it were of two persons; and both, as I thought, talked at the same time, as if they were holding a parliament with great busyness. And it was all soft whispering, and I did not understand what they said. And all this was to stir me to despair, as it seemed to me; it seemed to me that they were mocking the saying of prayers that are rattled off with the mouth, with a great lack of devout attention and wise diligence, which we owe to God in our prayer.

And our good Lord God gave me grace to trust mightily in Him, and to comfort my soul with bodily speech, as I would have done for another person who was in hardship. It seemed to me that this busyness could not be likened to any bodily thing.

My bodily eye I set on the same cross where I had seen comfort before that time; my tongue on speaking of Christ's Passion and repeating the faith of Holy Church; and my heart on fastening itself to God with all the trust and the might that I had, thinking to myself: "You have great work now to keep yourself in the faith, so that you are not taken by your enemies. If from now on you would always be as busy keeping yourself from sin, that would be a good and a sovereign occupation." For I thought faithfully that if I were safe from sin, I would be wholly safe from all the fiends in hell and the enemies of my soul. And so he kept me occupied all that night, and the next morning, until it was about prime, early in the day. And at once they were all gone and passed, and nothing was left but the stench, and that lasted a while longer; and I scorned him. And so I was delivered from him by the power of Christ's Passion; for with this the fiend is overcome, as our Lord Jesus Christ said before.

Chapter 70: Faith Without a Sign

In all this blessed showing our good Lord gave me to understand that the sight would pass; and faith keeps this blessed showing, by His own good will and His grace. For He left me neither sign nor token by which I might know it; but He left me His own blessed word, truly understood, bidding me most mightily to believe it; and so I do, blessed may He be. I believe that He who showed it is our Savior, and that what He showed is in the faith. And therefore I love it, always rejoicing; and I am bound to this by all His own meaning, with the next words that follow: "Keep yourself in it, and comfort yourself with it, and trust in it." In this way I am beholden to keep it in my faith; for on the same day that it was shown, when the sight had passed, I forsook it like a wretch, and openly said that I had raved. Then our Lord Jesus in His mercy would not let it perish, but showed it all again within my soul, with more fullness, with the blessed light of His precious love, saying these words most mightily and most humbly: "Know it well now: it was no raving that you saw today." It was as if He had said: "Because the sight had passed from you, you lost it, and could not or might not keep it; but know it now," that is to say, "now that you see it." This was said not only for that time, but also to set the ground of my faith on it, where He says immediately after: "But take it, and learn it, and keep yourself in it, and comfort yourself with it, and trust in it, and you shall not be overcome."

In these six words that follow, where He says, "Take it," His meaning is to fasten it faithfully in our heart; for He wants it to dwell with us in faith to our life's end, and afterward in fullness of joy, wanting us always to have faithful trust in His blissful promises, knowing His goodness. For our faith is opposed in various ways, by our own blindness and by our spiritual enemies, within and without. And therefore our precious Lover helps us with spiritual light and true teaching, in various ways within and without, by which we may know Him. And therefore, in whatever way He teaches us, He wants us to perceive Him wisely, receive Him sweetly, and keep ourselves in Him faithfully. For above the faith no goodness is kept in this life, as I see it; and beneath the faith there is no health of soul; but in the faith, there our Lord wants us to keep ourselves. For we have it from His goodness and His own working that we keep ourselves in the faith; and by His permission we are tested in the faith through spiritual enmity, and made mighty. For if our faith had no enmity, it would deserve no reward, by the understanding I have of our Lord's meaning.

Chapter 71: Three Kinds of Cheer

Glad and merry and sweet is the blissful, lovely face of our Lord to our souls; for He has always looked on us, living in love-longing. And He wants our soul to show Him a glad face, to give Him His reward. And so I hope that by His grace He has drawn, and shall draw more, the outer face to the inner, and make us all one with Him, and each of us with the other, in the true lasting joy that is Jesus. I understand three kinds of face of our Lord. The first is the face of the Passion, as He showed it while He was with us in this life, dying. And though this sight is mournful and sorrowful, yet it is glad and merry, for He is God. The second kind of face is pity, and sorrow for us, and compassion; and He shows this, with sureness of keeping, to all His lovers who have need of His mercy. The third is the blissful face, as it shall be without end; and this was shown most often and continued longest. And so in the time of our pain and our woe He shows us the face of His Passion and His cross, helping us to bear it by His own blessed power. And in the time of our sinning He shows us the face of compassion and pity, mightily keeping us and defending us against all our enemies. And these two are the common faces which He shows us in this life, mingling the third with them; and that is His blissful face, like in part to what it shall be in heaven. And that comes by the gracious touching and sweet lighting of the spiritual life, by which we are kept in true faith, hope and charity, with contrition and devotion, and also with contemplation, and all kinds of true joys and sweet comforts. The blissful face of our Lord God works this in us by grace.

Chapter 72: Sin and Bliss Cannot Stand Together

But now I must tell in what way I saw sin as deadly in the creatures who shall not die for sin, but live in the joy of God without end. I saw that two contraries can never be together in one place. The most contrary that there are, are the highest bliss and the deepest pain. The highest bliss there is, is to have God in the clearness of endless light, truly seeing Him, sweetly feeling Him, having Him in all peace in fullness of joy; and in this way the blissful face of our Lord God was shown in part. In this showing I saw that sin is the most contrary, so far that as long as we are mingled with any part of sin, we shall never see clearly the blessed face of God. And the more horrible and the more grievous our sins are, the deeper we are for that time from this blessed sight. And therefore it often seems to us that we are in peril of death, and in a part of hell, for the sorrow and the pain that sin is to us. And so we are dead for the time to the true sight of our blissful life. But in all this I saw faithfully that we are not dead in the sight of God, and He never passes from us; but He shall never have His full bliss in us until we have our full bliss in Him, truly seeing His fair, blissful face; for we are ordained to it by nature, and brought to it by grace. In this way I saw how sin is deadly for a short time to the blessed creatures of endless life.

And the more clearly the soul sees the blissful face by the grace of loving, the more it longs to see it in fullness, that is to say, in His own likeness. For although our Lord God dwells in us now, and is here with us, and embraces us and encloses us for tender love, so that He may never leave us, and is nearer to us than tongue can tell or heart can think, yet we can never stop mourning, or weeping, or seeking, or longing, until we see Him clearly in His blissful face; for in that precious sight no woe can remain, and no weal can fail. And in this I saw matter for mirth and matter for mourning: matter for mirth, that our Lord, our Maker, is so near to us, and in us, and we in Him, by the faithfulness of His great goodness in keeping us; matter for mourning, because our spiritual eye is so blind, and we are so borne down by the weight of our mortal flesh and the darkness of sin, that we cannot see our Lord God clearly in His blissful face. No, and because of this darkness we can scarcely believe or trust His great love and the faithfulness with which we are kept.

And this is why I say that we can never leave off mourning or weeping. This weeping does not mean only the pouring out of tears from our bodily eye, but has also a more spiritual understanding; for the natural desire of our soul is so great and so beyond measure that if all the noble things God ever made in heaven and on earth were given us for our joy and our comfort, and we did not see the fair, blissful face of Himself, still we would never leave off mourning and spiritual weeping, that is to say, painful longing, until we truly see the fair, blissful face of our Maker. And if we were in all the pain that heart can think or tongue can tell, and we could at that time see His blissful face, all this pain would not grieve us. In this way that blissful sight is the end of every kind of pain for loving souls, and the fulfilling of every kind of joy and bliss. And He showed that in the high, marvelous words where He says, "I am He who is highest; I am He whom you love; I am He who is all."

It belongs to us to have three kinds of knowing. The first is that we know our Lord God. The second is that we know ourselves, what we are through Him by nature and by grace. The third is that we know humbly what our self is with regard to our sin and our feebleness. And it was for these three that all this showing was made, as I understand it.

Chapter 73: Impatience and Despair

All this blessed teaching of our Lord God was shown in three ways: by bodily sight, and by words formed in my understanding, and by spiritual sight. For the bodily sight, I have told what I saw as truly as I can; and for the words, I have given them just as our Lord showed them to me; and for the spiritual sight, I have told something of it, but I can never tell it fully. And therefore I am stirred to say more of this spiritual sight, as God will give me grace. God showed two kinds of sickness that we have. The one is impatience, or sloth; for we bear our labor and our pain heavily.

The other is despair, or doubtful dread, as I shall tell later. In general He showed sin, in which all is included, but in particular He showed only these two. And these two are what most wear us down and trouble us, according to what our Lord showed me.

And He wants us to be amended of them. I am speaking of such men and women as hate sin for God's love and dispose themselves to do God's will; for it is to these that we are most inclined, through our spiritual blindness and bodily heaviness. And therefore it is God's will that they be known, for then we shall refuse them as we do other sins. And for help against this, our Lord most humbly showed the patience He had in His hard Passion, and also the joy and the delight He has in that Passion, for love. And He showed this as an example, so that we should bear our pains gladly and easily; for that is very pleasing to Him and an endless profit to us. And the reason we are worn down by them is that we do not know love. Though the three Persons of the blessed Trinity are all equal in themselves, the soul took most understanding in love; yes, and He wants us in all things to have our contemplating and our rejoicing in love. And of this knowing we are most blind. For some of us believe that God is almighty and may do all, and that He is all wisdom and can do all; but that He is all love and will do all, there we fail. And it is this not knowing that most hinders God's lovers, as I see it. For when we begin to hate sin, and amend ourselves by the ordinance of Holy Church, there still remains a dread that hinders us, from looking at ourselves and at our sins done before. And some of us are hindered by our everyday sins; for we do not hold to our promises, or keep the cleanness our Lord sets us in, but often fall into so much wretchedness that it is a shame to say it. And looking at this makes us so sorry and so heavy that we can scarcely see any comfort. And this dread we sometimes take for humility, but it is a foul blindness and a wickedness. And we cannot despise it as we do another sin that we know, for it comes through lack of true judgment, and it is against truth. For of all the properties of the blissful Trinity, it is God's will that we have most faithfulness and delight in love; for love makes might and wisdom most humble toward us. For just as God in His courtesy forgets our sin after we repent, so He wants us to forget our sin, as far as our senseless heaviness and our doubtful dreads are concerned.

Chapter 74: Four Kinds of Dread

For I understood four kinds of dread. One is the dread of a fright that comes on a man suddenly, through frailty. This dread does good, for it helps to purge a man, as bodily sickness does, or any other pain that is not sin; for all such pains help a man, if they are patiently taken. The second is the dread of pain, by which a man is stirred and woken from the sleep of sin; for a man who is fast in the sleep of sin is not able for the time to receive the soft comfort of the Holy Spirit until he has taken on this dread of pain, of bodily death and of spiritual enemies. And this dread stirs us to seek comfort and mercy from God; and so this dread helps us as an entry, and makes us able to have contrition by the blissful touch of the Holy Spirit. The third is doubtful dread. Doubtful dread, insofar as it draws toward despair, God wants turned in us into love by the true knowing of love; that is to say, that the bitterness of doubt be turned into the sweetness of natural love by grace; for it can never please our Lord that His servants doubt His goodness. The fourth is reverent dread; for there is no dread in us that fully pleases God but reverent dread, and that is soft. For the more it is had, the less it is felt, for the sweetness of love.

Love and dread are brothers, and they are rooted in us by the goodness of our Maker, and they shall never be taken from us, without end. We have it from nature to love, and we have it from grace to love; and we have it from nature to dread, and we have it from grace to dread. It belongs to lordship and to fatherhood to be dreaded, as it belongs to goodness to be loved; and it belongs to us, who are His servants and His children, to dread Him for His lordship and fatherhood, as it belongs to us to love Him for His Godhead. And though this reverent dread and love are not both one, but are two in property and in working, neither of them can be had without the other. And therefore I am sure that he who loves, dreads, though he feels it only a little.

All dreads other than reverent dread that are offered to us, though they come under the color of holiness, are not so true; and this is how they may be told apart. That dread which makes us flee quickly from all that is not good, and fall into our Lord's breast as a child into its mother's arms, with all our intent and all our mind, knowing our feebleness and our great need, knowing His everlasting goodness and His blessed love, seeking only to Him for salvation, cleaving to Him with faithful trust: that dread which brings us into this working is natural, and gracious, and good, and true. And everything that is contrary to this is either wrong or mingled with wrong. This, then, is the remedy: to know them both, and refuse the wrong. For the natural property of dread which we have in this life by the gracious working of the Holy Spirit shall be the same in heaven before God, gentle, courteous, most sweet. And so in love we shall be familiar and near to God, and in dread we shall be gentle and courteous to God, and both alike, in the same way.

Let us desire, then, of our Lord God to dread Him reverently, and love Him humbly, and trust in Him mightily; for when we dread Him reverently and love Him humbly, our trust is never in vain. For the more we trust, and the more mightily we trust, the more we please and honor our Lord in whom we trust. And if we lack this reverent dread and humble love, which God forbid, our trust will soon be misruled for that time. And therefore we have great need to pray our Lord for grace, that we may have this reverent dread and humble love, as His gift, in heart and in deed; for without this no man can please God.

Chapter 75: Need, Love and Longing

I saw that God can do all that we need; and these are the three I shall speak of, need, love and longing. Pity and love keep us in the time of our need. And longing in the same love draws us into heaven; for the thirst of God is to have mankind in general into Himself. In this thirst He has drawn His holy souls who are now in bliss; and so, gathering His living members, He is always drawing and drinking, and still He thirsts and longs. I saw three kinds of longing in God, and all to one end. The first is that He longs to teach us to know Him and to love Him more and more, as is fitting and profitable for us. The second is that He longs to have us up in bliss, as souls are when they are taken out of pain into heaven. The third is to fill us with bliss, and that shall be fulfilled on the last day, to last forever. For I saw, as it is known in our faith, that then pain and sorrow shall be ended for all who shall be saved. And not only shall we receive the same bliss that souls have had in heaven before, but we shall also receive a new bliss, which shall flow plentifully out of God into us and fill us. And these are the good things He has ordained to give us from before all beginning. These good things are treasured and hidden in Himself; for until that time no creature is mighty or worthy enough to receive them.

In this we shall truly see the cause of all the deeds God has done; and more than that, we shall see the cause of all the things He has permitted. And the bliss and the fulfilling shall be so deep and so high that, for wonder and marvel, all creatures shall have so great a reverence and dread toward God, surpassing all that has been seen and felt before, that the pillars of heaven shall tremble and quake. But this kind of trembling and dread shall have no kind of pain; rather, it belongs to the worthy majesty of God to be looked on in this way by His creatures, fearfully trembling and quaking, but much more for joy, endlessly marveling at the greatness of God the Maker and at the least part of all that is made. For contemplating this makes a creature marvelously humble and mild. And therefore God wills, and it belongs to us also both by nature and by grace, that we want to have knowledge of this, desiring the sight and the working; for it leads us in the right way, and keeps us in true life, and makes us one with God. And as good as God is, so great He is; and as much as it belongs to His Godhead to be loved, so much it belongs to His great highness to be dreaded. For this reverent dread is the fairest courtesy there is in heaven before God's face. And as much as He shall then be known and loved beyond what He is now, so much shall He be dreaded beyond what He is now. And therefore it must needs be that all heaven and all earth shall tremble and quake when the pillars tremble and quake.

Chapter 76: Reverent Dread

I say only a little about this reverent dread, for I hope it can be seen in what has been said already. But I know well that our Lord showed me no souls but those that dread Him; for I know well that the soul that truly takes the teaching of the Holy Spirit hates sin more, for its vileness and its horror, than it hates all the pain that is in hell. For the soul that contemplates the nature of our Lord Jesus hates no hell; for hell, as I see it, is sin. And therefore it is God's will that we know sin, and pray busily, and labor willingly, and seek teaching humbly, so that we do not fall into it blindly; and if we fall, that we rise readily; for it is the greatest pain the soul can have, to turn from God at any time by sin. The soul that wants to be at rest, when other men's sins come to mind, should flee from it as from the pain of hell, seeking to God for help against it; for looking at other men's sins makes, as it were, a thick mist before the eye of the soul. And we cannot for the time see the fairness of God, unless we can look at them with contrition with him, with compassion on him, and with holy desire to God for him. For without this it harms and troubles and hinders the soul that looks at them; for this I understand in the showing of compassion.

In this blissful showing of our Lord I have understanding of two contraries. The one is the greatest wisdom any creature can practice in this life; the other is the greatest folly. The greatest wisdom is for a creature to act by the will and the counsel of his highest sovereign Friend. This blessed Friend is Jesus, and it is His will and counsel that we hold ourselves with Him, and fasten ourselves familiarly to Him, always, in whatever state we are; for whether we are foul or clean, we are always one in His loving. For weal or for woe He never wants us to flee from Him. But because of the changeability that is in us, in ourselves, we often fall into sin. Then we have this dread by the stirring of our enemy, and by our own folly and blindness; for they say this: "You know well that you are a wretch, a sinner, and unfaithful besides, for you do not keep your covenant. You often promise our Lord that you will do better, and at once you fall back into the same, especially into sloth and the losing of time." For that is the beginning of sin, as I see it, and especially for the creatures who have given themselves to serve our Lord in inward contemplation of His blissful goodness. And this makes us afraid to appear before our courteous Lord. Then it is our enemy who wants to set us back with his false dread of our wretchedness, through the pain he threatens us with; for his intention is to make us so heavy and so sorry in this that we should let slip from our mind the blissful contemplation of our everlasting Friend.

Chapter 77: Do Not Accuse Yourself Too Much

Our good Lord showed the enmity of the fiend, by which I understood that everything contrary to love and to peace is of the fiend and of his party. And we have it from our feebleness and our folly to fall, and we have it from the mercy and grace of the Holy Spirit to rise to more joy. And if our enemy gains anything from us by our falling, for that is his pleasure, he loses many times more in our rising, by charity and humility. And this glorious rising is so great a sorrow and pain to him, for the hatred he has for our soul, that he burns continually in envy. And all this sorrow that he would make us have shall turn back on himself. And it was for this that our Lord scorned him, and showed that he shall be scorned; and this made me laugh mightily.

This, then, is the remedy: that we acknowledge our wretchedness and flee to our Lord; for the needier we are, the more it profits us to touch Him. And let us say this in our thought: "I know well that I have deserved pain; but our Lord is almighty, and may punish me mightily; and He is all wisdom, and can punish me wisely; and He is all goodness, and loves me tenderly." And it profits us to remain in this contemplation; for it is a most lovely humility in a sinful soul, worked by the mercy and grace of the Holy Spirit, when we are willing and glad to take the scourging and the chastising that our Lord Himself will give us; and it will be most tender and most easy, if we will only hold ourselves content with Him and with all His works.

For the penance that a man takes on himself was not shown me; that is to say, it was not shown me in particular. But this was shown especially and highly, and with a most lovely face, that we should humbly and patiently bear and suffer the penance that God Himself gives us, keeping His blessed Passion in mind; for when we keep His blessed Passion in mind with pity and love, then we suffer with Him, as His friends did who saw it. And this was shown in the Thirteenth Showing, near the beginning, where it speaks of pity; for He says: "Do not accuse yourself, thinking that your tribulation and your woe are all your fault; for I do not want you to be heavy or sorrowful without discretion. For I tell you, whatever you do, you shall have woe. And therefore I want you to know wisely the penance you are in continually, and to take it humbly as your penance. And then you shall truly see that all this living is profitable penance."

This place is prison, this life is penance, and in the remedy He wants us to rejoice. The remedy is that our Lord is with us, keeping us and leading us into the fullness of joy; for this is an endless joy to us in our Lord's meaning, that He who shall be our bliss when we are there is our keeper while we are here, our way and our heaven, in true love and faithful trust. And He gave understanding of this in everything, and especially in the showing of His Passion, where He made me choose Him mightily for my heaven. Let us flee to our Lord, and we shall be comforted; let us touch Him, and we shall be made clean; let us cleave to Him, and we shall be sure and safe from every kind of peril. For our courteous Lord wants us to be as familiar with Him as heart can think or soul can desire. But let us beware that we do not take this familiarity so carelessly as to leave courtesy behind; for our Lord Himself is sovereign familiarity, and as familiar as He is, so courteous He is; for He is truly courteous. And the blessed creatures who shall be in heaven with Him without end, He wants to have like Himself in all things; and to be like our Lord perfectly is our true salvation and our full bliss. And if we do not know how we shall do all this, let us ask it of our Lord, and He shall teach us; for it is His own delight and His honor. Blessed may He be.

Chapter 78: Our Sin Seen by the Light of Mercy

Our Lord in His mercy shows us our sin and our feebleness by the sweet, gracious sight of Himself. For our sin is so foul and so horrible that He in His courtesy will not show it to us except by the light of His mercy. It is His will that we have knowledge of four things. The first is that He is the ground from whom we have all our life and our being. The second is that He keeps us mightily and mercifully in the time that we are in our sin, among all our enemies, who are very fierce against us; and we are in all the more peril because we give them occasion for it, and do not know our own need. The third is how courteously He keeps us, and makes us know that we are going astray. The fourth is how steadfastly He waits for us and does not change His face; for He wants us to be turned and made one with Him in love, as He is with us. And so by this gracious knowing we may see our sin profitably, without despair; for truly we need to see it, and by the sight we shall be made ashamed of ourselves and broken down with regard to our pride and our presumption; for we must truly see that of ourselves we are nothing at all but sin and wretchedness. And so by the sight of the lesser that our Lord shows us, the greater, which we do not see, is wasted away; for He in His courtesy measures the sight to us, since it is so foul and so horrible that we could not endure to see it as it is. And so by this humble knowing, through contrition and grace, we shall be broken from everything that is not our Lord. And then our blessed Savior shall perfectly cure us and make us one with Himself.

This breaking and this curing our Lord means for mankind in general; for he who is highest and nearest to God may see himself sinful and needy along with me; and I, who am the least and the lowest of those who shall be saved, may be comforted along with him who is highest. In this way our Lord has made us one in charity, when He showed me that I would sin. And for the joy I had in contemplating Him, I did not readily attend to that showing; and our courteous Lord stopped there and would teach me no further until He gave me the grace and the will to attend. And from this I was taught that though we are lifted high into contemplation by the special gift of our Lord, still we must needs have with it the sight and knowledge of our sin and of our feebleness. For without this knowing we cannot have true humility, and without this we cannot be safe. And I also saw that we cannot have this knowing from ourselves, nor from any of our spiritual enemies; for they do not wish us so much good; for if it were up to them, we would never see it until our dying day. Then we are greatly bound to God, that He Himself, for love, will show it to us in the time of mercy and grace.

Chapter 79: I Keep You Full Surely

I also had more understanding in this, in that He showed me that I would sin. I took it nakedly to my own single person, for I was not otherwise stirred at that time; but by the high, gracious comfort that followed afterward I saw that His meaning was for mankind in general, that is to say, all mankind, which is sinful and shall be until the last day; of which mankind I am a member, as I hope, by the mercy of God; for the blessed comfort that I saw is large enough for us all. And there I was taught that I should see my own sin, and not other men's, unless it may be for the comfort or help of my fellow Christians. And also in the same showing where I saw that I would sin, I was taught to be fearful because of my own unsureness. For I do not know how I shall fall, nor do I know the measure or the greatness of my sin; for I would have liked to know that, in my fear, and to that I had no answer. Also our courteous Lord at that same time showed most sweetly and most mightily the endlessness and the unchangeableness of His love, and also His great goodness and His gracious inward keeping, so that the love between Him and our souls shall never be parted, without end. And so in the dread I have matter for humility, which saves me from presumption; and in the blessed showing of love I have matter for true comfort and for joy, which saves me from despair.

All this familiar showing of our courteous Lord is a lovely lesson, and a sweet, gracious teaching of Himself, to comfort our soul. For He wants us to know, by the sweetness of His familiar love, that everything we see or feel, within or without, that is contrary to this is of the enemy, and not of God. For example, if we are stirred to be more careless of our living, or of the keeping of our heart, because we have knowledge of this plentiful love, then we have great need to beware of this stirring, if it comes. It is untrue, and we ought greatly to hate it, for it has no likeness to God's will. And when we have fallen, by frailty or blindness, then our courteous Lord touches us, stirs us and keeps us. And then He wants us to see our wretchedness and humbly acknowledge it. But He does not want us to remain there, nor does He want us to busy ourselves greatly with accusing ourselves, nor does He want us to be too wretched over ourselves; but He wants us to turn quickly to Him. For He stands all alone and waits for us continually, moaning and mourning until we come. And He is in haste to have us with Him; for we are His joy and His delight, and He is the salve of our life. When I say He stands all alone, I leave aside the blessed company in heaven, and speak only of His office and His working here on earth, according to the showing.

Chapter 80: Three Things We Stand By

Man stands in this life by three things, and by these three God is honored, and we are helped, kept and saved. The first is the use of man's natural reason. The second is the common teaching of Holy Church. The third is the inward, gracious working of the Holy Spirit. And these three are all of one God. God is the ground of our natural reason; and God is the teaching of Holy Church; and God is the Holy Spirit. And they are all different gifts, which He wants us to regard greatly and to accord ourselves with; for they work in us continually, all together, and they are great things. Of this greatness He wants us to have knowledge here, as it were in an ABC, that is to say, to have a little knowledge of it, of which we shall have the fullness in heaven; and that is to help us on. We know in our faith that God alone took our nature, and none but He; and furthermore, that Christ alone did all the great works that belong to our salvation, and none but He; and just so He alone does now in the final end; that is to say, He dwells here in us, and rules us, and governs us in this living, and brings us to His bliss. And so He shall do as long as there is any soul on earth that shall come to heaven; so far that, if there were no such soul on earth but one, He would be with that one all alone until He had brought it up to His bliss. I believe and understand the ministering of holy angels, as scholars tell of it; but it was not shown me; for He Himself is nearest and humblest, highest and lowest, and does all. And not only does He do all that we need, but He also does all that is honorable, for our joy in heaven.

And where I say that He waits for us moaning and mourning, it means all the true feeling we have in ourselves, in contrition and in compassion, and all moaning and mourning because we are not made one with our Lord; and all such as is profitable is Christ in us. And though some of us feel it seldom, it never passes from Christ until He has brought us out of all our woe; for love never allows Him to be without pity. And whenever we fall into sin, and leave off remembering Him and keeping our own soul, then Christ alone bears all the charge of us. And so He stands moaning and mourning. Then it belongs to us, for reverence and natural love, to turn quickly to our Lord and not leave Him all alone. He is here alone with us all; that is to say, He is here only for us. And whenever I am estranged from Him by sin, despair or sloth, then I let my Lord stand alone, insofar as He is in me. And so it goes with all of us who are sinners. But though we do this often, His goodness never allows us to be alone; but He is with us lastingly, and tenderly He excuses us, and always keeps us from blame in His sight.

Chapter 81: Our Whole Life a Penance

Our good Lord showed Himself to His creature in various ways, both in heaven and on earth; but I saw Him take no place except in man's soul. He showed Himself on earth in the sweet Incarnation and His blessed Passion; and in another way He showed Himself on earth, where I said, "I saw God in a point." And in another way He showed Himself on earth as if on a pilgrimage; that is to say, He is here with us, leading us, and shall be until He has brought us all to His bliss in heaven. He showed Himself reigning at various times, as has been said before, but principally in man's soul. He has taken His resting place there, and His honorable city; and from that honorable throne He shall never rise or move, without end. Marvelous and majestic is the place where the Lord dwells. And therefore He wants us to respond readily to His gracious touch, rejoicing more in His whole love than sorrowing in our frequent fallings. For of all the things we can do, it is the greatest honor to Him that we live gladly and merrily, for His love, in our penance; for He looks on us so tenderly that He sees all our living here as penance. For the natural longing in us toward Him is a lasting penance in us, a penance which He works in us, and mercifully He helps us to bear it. For His love makes Him long; His wisdom and His truth, with His rightfulness, make Him allow us to be here. And in this way He wants to see it in us; for this is our natural penance, and the highest, as I see it. For this penance never leaves us until the time when we are fulfilled, when we shall have Him as our reward. And therefore He wants us to set our hearts on the passing over, that is to say, from the pain we feel into the bliss we trust.

Chapter 82: I Know You Want to Live for My Love

But here our courteous Lord showed the moaning and the mourning of our soul, meaning this: "I know well that you want to live for my love, merrily and gladly suffering all the penance that may come to you; but because you do not live without sin, you are heavy and sorrowful. And if you could live without sin, you would suffer for my love all the woe that could come to you; and that is true. But do not be too much grieved by sin that comes upon you against your will." And here I understood that the lord looks on the servant with pity and not with blame; for this passing life does not require us to live wholly without sin. He loves us endlessly, and we sin habitually; and He shows it to us most mildly, and then we sorrow and mourn with discretion, turning ourselves to the contemplation of His mercy, cleaving to His love and to His goodness, seeing that He is our medicine, knowing that we do nothing but sin. And so, by the humility we gain in the sight of our sin, faithfully knowing His everlasting love, thanking Him and praising Him, we please Him. "I love you and you love me, and our love shall never be parted in two; and for your profit I suffer." And all this was shown in spiritual understanding, with these blessed words: "I keep you most surely."

And by the great desire I saw in our blessed Lord that we should live in this way, that is to say, in longing and rejoicing, as all this lesson of love shows, I understand that everything contrary to this is not of Him, but of enmity. And He wants us to know it by the sweet, gracious light of His natural love. If there is anyone living on earth who is continually kept from falling, I do not know of it; for it was not shown me. But this was shown: that in falling and in rising we are always preciously kept in one love. For in the contemplation of God we do not fall, and in the contemplation of ourselves we do not stand; and both of these are true, as I see it. But the contemplation of our Lord God is the higher truth. Then we are greatly bound to Him, that He wills to show us this high truth in this life. And I understood that while we are in this life it is most profitable for us to see both of these at once. For the higher contemplation keeps us in spiritual joy and true rejoicing in God; the other, the lower contemplation, keeps us in dread and makes us ashamed of ourselves. But our good Lord always wants us to hold ourselves much more in the contemplation of the higher, and yet not to leave the knowing of the lower, until the time that we are brought up above, where we shall have our Lord Jesus as our reward and be filled with joy and bliss without end.

Chapter 83: Life, Love and Light

I had in part a touching, a sight and a feeling of three properties of God, in which the strength and the effect of the whole revelation stand. And they were seen in every showing, and most properly in the Twelfth, where it says again and again, "I am He." The properties are these: life, love and light. In life is marvelous familiarity, in love is gentle courtesy, and in light is endless kinship of nature. These three properties were seen in one goodness, and to this goodness my reason wanted to be made one and to cleave with all its powers. I looked with reverent dread, marveling greatly at the sight and at the feeling of the sweet accord, that our reason is in God, understanding that it is the highest gift we have received, and that it is grounded in nature. Our faith is a light, coming by nature from our endless day, who is our Father, God; and in this light our Mother, Christ, and our good Lord the Holy Spirit lead us in this passing life. This light is measured with discretion, standing by us as we need it in the night. The light is the cause of our life; the night is the cause of our pain and all our woe; and in this woe we desire endless reward and thanks from God; for with mercy and grace we willingly know and believe our light, going in it wisely and mightily. And at the end of woe our eye shall suddenly be opened, and in clearness of sight our light shall be full; and this light is God our Maker, Father and Holy Spirit, in Christ Jesus our Savior. In this way I saw and understood that our faith is our light in our night, and this light is God, our endless day.

Chapter 84: Charity

This light is charity, and the measuring of this light is done for us profitably by the wisdom of God; for the light is neither so large that we can see our blissful day clearly, nor is it shut away from us altogether; but it is such a light that we can live in it with merit, by our labor, earning the honoring thanks of God. And this was seen in the Sixth Showing, where He says, "I thank you for your service, and for your labor." In this way charity keeps us in faith and in hope, and faith and hope lead us in charity; and at the end all shall be charity. I had three kinds of understanding in this light of charity. The first is charity unmade; the second is charity made; the third is charity given. Charity unmade is God; charity made is our soul in God; charity given is virtue, and that is a gracious gift of working, in which we love God for Himself, and ourselves in God, and all that God loves for God.

Chapter 85: Thus It Is Well

And in this sight I marveled greatly; for in spite of our simple living and our blindness here, our courteous Lord endlessly looks on us in this working, rejoicing. And of all things, we can please Him best by believing this wisely and truly, and by rejoicing with Him and in Him. For as truly as we shall be in the bliss of God without end, praising Him and thanking Him, just as truly have we been in the foresight of God, loved and known in His endless purpose from before all beginning. In this love that had no beginning He made us; in the same love He keeps us, and never allows us to be hurt in any way by which our bliss might be lessened. And therefore, when the judgment is given and we are all brought up above, then we shall see clearly in God the secrets which are hidden from us now. And then none of us shall be stirred to say of anything, "Lord, if it had been thus, it would have been well." But we shall all say with one voice, "Lord, blessed may You be, for it is thus: thus it is well. And now we see truly that everything is done as You ordained it before anything was made."

Chapter 86: Love Was His Meaning

This book was begun by God's gift and His grace, but it is not yet completed, as I see it. For charity, let us all pray together, with God's working, thanking, trusting, rejoicing. For this is how our good Lord wants to be prayed to, by the understanding I took from all His own meaning, and from the sweet words where He says most merrily, "I am the ground of your beseeching." For truly I saw and understood in our Lord's meaning that He showed it because He wants it to be known more than it is; and in this knowing He will give us grace to love Him and cleave to Him. For He sees His heavenly treasure and His solace in heavenly joy in drawing our hearts from the sorrow and darkness we are in. And from the time that it was shown, I often wanted to know what our Lord's meaning was. And fifteen years after, and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it said this: "Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well: love was His meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did He show you? Love. Why did He show it? For love. Hold yourself in it, and you shall know more in the same. But you shall never know anything else in it, without end." In this way I was taught that love is our Lord's meaning. And I saw most surely, in this and in everything, that before God made us He loved us; and this love was never slackened, and never shall be. And in this love He has done all His works; and in this love He has made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had our beginning; but the love in which He made us was in Him from before all beginning; and in this love we have our beginning. And all this we shall see in God without end.

Deo Gratias.

Explicit liber Revelationum Juliane Anachorite Norwic. cujus anime propicietur Deus.

Thanks be to God. Here ends the book of the revelations of Julian, anchoress of Norwich, on whose soul may God have mercy.