It can sweep over you like a wave. It can gradually form inside you, a glow that becomes brighter until you are subsumed in light and become light. Light is our origin and our real nature. Being images, we are light. So we become what we always were. Therein the mystery, if that is what it is. I was lost and I was found: the light seemed to come on. The one who couldn’t see the light came gradually to perceive it and to reflect it and to grow bright. Or there is no wave, no dawning. Maybe it is only in the dull smallness of myself that, devoid of other, I am trapped in myself, a black hole of selfhood that cannot even emit light. But (and the whole creation is contained in that ‘but’) when my I admits the Thou, then there is relation, even union; then there is a light source and a thing illuminated.
After this (and it may take a few of his advances because I am slow on the uptake) I become the lover, and my days are spent longing for the beloved. Now his face is imprinted everywhere. Yet he is hard to catch up with; he moves faster than I do, though he denies this and insists the contrary. Either way, it is a race between my faculties and my forgetfulness, to find again that condition of knowing myself through him and him through myself.
How to even talk about it? Pointless to try, except if it help to prolong the vigil, to keep the watchers awake, to season plain words with poetry, to help each other not to fall into doubt or despair. For it came, he came: he did truly come. In truth he came at the moment of your birth and never departed, though maybe you can’t know that yet.
The rest of your life in exile is spent trying to return home, to return to where he is, which is your home. You knew him before you knew yourself, though you had to come to know yourself to realise this. Then you know your home. He moves about, like the places in the world here (your feet allow the earth to wander about under you) and your heart, no longer a black hole but now bright as a sun, reflecting the true sunlight with which he irradiates you. When it is like that, you have reached his threshold, even stepped over it.
*
It is unmistakable. Sometimes you stumble home, finding it despite your tiredness or drunkenness or despite finding yourself in a town you don’t know, because your own town has gone away and this one has come instead. Maybe you weren’t even looking for home at that moment but instead were chasing some idea, some figment, some wild goose of yourself in another, and home was not on your mind. And there are moments when you long for home but cannot find it. Or home has shifted away. You cannot move home from this home, but if instead you try to fix it down, it moves away. Maybe you don’t even know any more what home is like, never mind where to look for it, because it seems so long since you were there, or since it caught up with you.
When homesick, you ask the people you meet for directions, but they don’t know where your home has gone; they can’t tell that even by looking closely into your eyes. They may be in their own home, or they may, like you, be in exile, that hard country that envelopes us all when we cannot remember where we left our home or where it may have moved to.
It can creep up on you when you least expect it. It can pervade your mind and your heart. Suddenly you have come home, without moving – so your home has come to you. How do you even know that it, or he, has come? It is where you see yourself in your full noble extent and have complete compassion for all around you, because you also know homelessness and exile.
There are moments when you come home like this, or similarly to this. It is a recognition of the home that has never left you, but that has tactfully waited, silently, for you to find it, acknowledge it and take occupancy of it. I was going to say ‘take ownership’, but that is not quite correct. You don’t own that home, for all that it is for you and you alone. You know from your own experience of running a guest house, what it is to own and keep a home. And you know the general run of guests and how they treat it. But now you find yourself at the threshold of a home where you are the occupant, where you are the guest in your own home. It is a subtle matter. ‘My Father’s house’ – the hidden keeper is who makes this place your home, who keeps it and who causes your home to follow you, or sometimes to move ahead of you, ready for your eventual arrival. Coming to know, to meet, to be united with him, that is your great yearning. He lies there beyond all thought, all state, all happening, all idea or concept. His face is known inwardly and not as an image, though if you can see it, it is imprinted on all things.
At times he calls for you and you are home. Often when you are least expecting it. Or else you have been in exile for a long time and it feels hopeless. Or you have forgotten, or fallen into resentment. What you don’t see, though, is how joyful he is to have you there. You are the image of himself that he has always yearned to see. There are situations and moments when he gets to see the image, you, and that is when you are flooded with light. It is realised, consummated even. Then the lovers are alone together.
For the rest of your days this is your happiness. Knowing that it has come to pass. That death cannot take it away (and more likely will be the seal on it). You can’t bring it about by your own efforts – you can’t make your home arrive to you, you can’t compel him to see you. Even your longing is precious, and so it is prolonged. You can use the memory of home, of him, of the light of your being, to keep up your own light and to transfigure this exile meanwhile.
And you can make yourself ready, preparing for the nuptial night, and news of those preparations will get through.
