The Forgotten Threshold | Page 8

that line." You see he knew that our souls in their
beauty are always above it.
August 3.
To watch a grass-blade tapping will teach you wonderful music--the
language of the wind. The sunlight running through my flesh in-flames
the song of the will. I lost myself tonight in the crowded silences. Joy
stays with me now, and if I can only join it to sorrow, the will can then
sing simply and freely a continuous song. The turning of the tide is
soon to come, and my homesickness for G----ville is transforming itself
into a different nostalgia. My planets are rising in song like little candle
flames. I wish I possessed their humility. Within me tonight are quiet
moonlit waters very full and rich with silent promises of rest.
August 4.
At Mass today Mr. C---- showed a fine courtesy serving with the high
humility of a punctilious gentleman. ... Today I saw the body of Christ,
"infinite riches in a little room." The human body of Christ in its
passion is the sum of all our bodies, and it is this truth to which
pantheism in its blindness dimly beckons. The saints and pure poets
and those who have died for friends are the image of the Sacred Heart,
and in them at moments of pure reflection there is naked light and the
vision which is insupportable. Hence in the greatest saints the stigmata.
All God's lonely ones are the reflections of His pain when they attain to
sanctity. And holy priests are the reflections of His Hands. Little
children and saints may look into His Eyes and see their own. And
repentant sinners may reflect His Feet in their tears. All the births and
lives of the earth go to form His Human Body, which is vast as Eternity
and radiating with Light from all points and inward to the Heart of
Light. To some saints it has been permitted to be the spouse of this
body and soul. Magic is white or black. White magic is the offspring of
spiritual marriage and is a sacrament. Black magic is the offspring of

unauthorized spiritual contacts. My frame tonight is possessed by
angels dancing before the throne in a fearfully rapid rhythm. The secret
of spiritual achievement is unremitting labor urged without ceasing by
a fearful joy. No drama is more vast than that of the crucifixion, and yet
I have seen it all in the heart of a strawberry blossom with wounds all
glorified in an ecstasy of living trembling light, and heard the beating
of His Sacred Heart while universe called out to universe in the anguish
of His surrender and all the stars died into the Light of Eternity. The
tide has turned.
August 5.
Today looking into a narrow dome I saw the seeded planets banded by
circles of light whereon they turned. And color changed into silence at
the bidding of the central suns. And these were the eyes of happy
innocence wherein all others died to the Living Light, God being in
them by their childishness. The tide turned yesterday, and today I have
spent entirely in eternity surrounded by a host of fair-winged
Possibilities, God's angels to humanity. Death is glorified by their
passage from the future to the past, and we respond by plunging our
lights into the Light wherein it dies. Abt Vogler is the musical
philosophy of it all. At my first symphony concert as a little boy, I saw
the face of the dying Christ through the wall, and in it the music of the
seventh Symphony sang through the naked eyes calling me inward to
the Sacred Heart. This morning and noon at table I smiled at white
horizons and in the evening I swam through the Host on my future
wings. We love earth, air, fire, and water now, but the eternal joy of
swimming through the Light of God and reflecting His Light in song
and silence is the infinity of all poets' dreams incarnate in the awful
speed of Absolute Music. It is the privilege of laughing into the Eyes of
God, those Eyes before which the angels veil their faces. It is the
privilege of smelling the blossom of the Living Rose, of tasting and
consuming forever the Body and Blood, of touching the Sacred Knees,
and of hearing the Divinity who is Music. Priests and poets shall swim
in the song of his heart, and those who have died for friends will reflect
its resolving rhythm. How I pity Blake his pride, though he was
preserved from the pride of humility. God will let me see more of Him

in this life than Blake did, though it is of the most trifling significance
to anticipate eternity in poor time, the crippled heir of