Chapter XXI
“We be now with Him in His Pains and His Passion, dying. We shall be with Him in Heaven. Through learning in this little pain that we suffer here, we shall have an high endless knowledge of God which we could never have without that”
IT is God’s will, as to mine understanding, that we have Three[1] Manners of Beholding His blessed Passion. The First is: the hard Pain that He suffered,—[beholding it] with contrition and compassion. And that shewed our Lord in this time, and gave me strength and grace to see it.
And I looked for the departing with all my might, and thought to have seen the body all dead; but I saw Him not so. And right in the same time that methought, by the seeming, the life might no longer last and the Shewing of the end behoved needs to be,—suddenly (I beholding in the same Cross), He changed [the look of] His blessed Countenance.[2] The changing of His blessed Countenance changed mine, and I was as glad and merry as it was possible. Then brought our Lord merrily to my mind: Where is now any point of the pain, or of thy grief? And I was full merry.
I understood that we be now, in our Lord’s meaning, in His Cross with Him in His pains and His Passion, dying; and we, willingly abiding in the same Cross with His help and His grace unto the last point, suddenly He shall change His Cheer to us, and we shall be with Him in Heaven. Betwixt that one and that other shall be no time, and then shall all be brought to joy. And thus said He in this Shewing: Where is now any point of thy pain, or thy grief? And we shall be full blessed.
And here saw I verily that if He shewed now [to] us His Blissful Cheer, there is no pain in earth or in other place that should aggrieve us; but all things should be to us joy and bliss. But because He sheweth to us time of His Passion, as He bare it in this life, and His Cross, therefore we are in distress and travail, with Him, as our frailty asketh. And the cause why He suffereth [it to be so,] is for [that] He will of His goodness make us the higher with Him in His bliss; and for this little pain that we suffer here, we shall have an high endless knowing in God which we could[3] never have without that. And the harder our pains have been with Him in His Cross, the more shall our worship[4] be with Him in His Kingdom.