Worship God with Your Substance

From: The Book of Privy Counsel  *

CHAPTER V

You have reached a point where your further growth in perfection demands that you do not feed your mind with meditations on the multiple aspects of your being.  In the past, these pious meditations, helped you to understand something of God.  They fed your interior affection with a sweet and delightful attraction for Him and spiritual things, and filled your mind with a certain spiritual wisdom.  But now it is important that you seriously concentrate on the effort to abide continually in the deep center of your spirit, offering to God that naked blind awareness of your being which I call your first fruits.  If you do this, if you may with the help of God’s Grace, be confident that Solomon’s charge to feed the poor with your first fruits will be fully accomplished also, just as he promises; and all without your interior faculties having to seek or search carefully among the attributes of your being or of God’s.

I want you to understand clearly that in this work it is not necessary to inquire into minute details of God’s existence any more than of your own.  For there is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of God than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word: “is”.

Describe Him as you will: good, fair, Lord, sweet, merciful, righteous, wise, all-knowing, strong one, almighty; as knowledge, wisdom, might, strength, love, or charity, and you will find them all hidden and contained in this little word: “is”.  God in His very existence is each and all of these.  If you spoke of Him in hundred like ways you would not go beyond or increase the significance of that one word: “is”.  And if you used none of them, you would have taken nothing from it. So be as blind in the loving contemplation of God’s being as you are in the naked awareness of your own.  Let your faculties rest from their minute inquiry into the attributes of his being or yours.  Leave all this behind and worship Him with your substance:  all that you are, just as you are, offered to all that He is, just as He is.  For your God is the glorious being of Himself and you, in the naked starkness of his being.

And thus you will bind everything together, and in a wonderful way, worship God with Himself because that which you are you have from Him and it is He, Himself.  Of course, you had a beginning – that moment in time when He created you from nothing – yet your being has been and shall always be in Him, from eternity to eternity, for He is eternal.  And therefore, I will continue to cry out this one thing:

Worship God with your substance
and help all mankind with your first fruits.
Then shall your barns be filled with abundance.

The promise contained in these last words is that your interior affection will be filled with an abundance of love and practical goodness arising out of your life in God, who is your ground of being and your singleness of heart.  And your presses shall run over with wine.  These presses are your internal spiritual faculties.  Formerly you forced and constrained them in all kinds of meditations and rational inquiry in an effort to gain some spiritual understanding of God and yourself, of his attributes and yours. But now they are filled and overflow with wine.  This wine Holy Scripture speaks of is accurately and mystically understood to be that spiritual wisdom distilled in the deep contemplation and high savoring of the transcendent God.  And how spontaneously, joyously, and effortlessly shall all this happen through the working of Grace.  Busy toil of yours is no longer necessary, for in the power of this gentle, blind contemplative work, angels will bring you wisdom.  Indeed, the angels’ knowledge is specially directed to this service as a handmaid to her lady.

From:  The Book of Privy Counsel  (Download PDF)

* Editor’s Note: The quotation marks around “is” have been added for emphasis.  Several scanning typos have also been corrected.