"It is senseless to ask how far my action reaches, and where God's grace begins; there is no common border line; what concerns me alone, when the action is successfully done, is God's grace. The one is no less real than the other, and neither is a part the cause. God and man do not divide the government of the world between them; man's action is enclosed in God's action, but it is still real ac­tion."

                                                     - Martin Buber

FIDELE D'AMORE      

          And if you were invited, would you go to the games of God? If you were called, would you pin a rose on your lapel and dance with the daimons? Would you go up the great channel toward the pure light, leaving your body behind stretched there on the narrow table?  

          As My Lord said, ”many are called...but if you once put your hand to the plow, do not look back.” or words to that effect.  

          And if you were called, how will you face the beauty of His face? Will you risk madness for a drop of Her recognition? will you risk total destruction of ego for the glory of becoming one with Its Being? If an angel came to you and said, "you are chosen to see the face of the Beloved" would you quibble as to whether it was illegal or not, whether it was acceptable to your class or religion, if the means and the vehicle were not quite in proper taste? And if you must return again to the reality of your race and time, could you stand the separation?  

          And when My Lord turns aside - and He will, He will -

          the old Deus absconditus act - what will you do then?

          Oh, dear heart!

          It is not the going,

          it is the returning, that hurts.

          God is a trickster, baby, a mind blower.

          God is a tough Lover.  

          For one glimpse of His beauty, you have sacrificed your wife and children, your country and class; like a junky, you blew it all, and you stand there like a damn fool knocking at the Beloved’s door. She does not answer.  

          God is a joker, a gamesman, a hunter.

          What will you do now?  

          Pick up the remnants of your ego, put it all back together again somehow, scrap by scrap? And where will you go then, naked and bereft, after you have seen His beauty, after She has seen Her Own beauty through your eyes and nervous system - sublime, dazzling, shimmering in the unearthly light running through your mind and emotions with breakneck speed through the history of Her sentient being - and there you stand in the desert and wind of His emptiness. Where do you go from there? You poor whore of God.  

          Let me tell you! There is no place to go.

          Now, you are a 'fidele de amore’- one who has seen His face.

          You are good for nothing anymore among men.

          Until your last breath you will be alone,

          You will have to endure a loneliness so intense it will be like

          wearing a skin on fire.

     No more will you taste the love of man or woman or child. The simple, darling delights of human existence will no longer be yours to enjoy, the intimate smile of your own woman or man, the laughter and naughtiness of your own child, the warmth of your neighborhood bar. The communion at the ballgame, the nonsense of relatives at the  party will no longer be yours to bask in, not the gossip and friendly small talk around the holiday table, in the cocktail lounge, in the lodge and around the piano - while the waiters come and go, talking of Michelangelo.  

          No longer will success and victory carry their delights, nor will sunrise and set stir your heart as in the past, nor the open plain and the paved road stretching to the purple mountains make your heart and blood sing.  

          You have been had, my friend: you have been had!

          You are an 'Fidele de Amore’

          One who has seen God, one who has been loved by God.       

            There is nothing more. Enjoy small pleasures now, and simplicity.

          What is to be, will be. There is nothing to be done,

          there is nowhere to go, the loneliness may sting

         but you are one, whole and free,

          singing the sad song...

          This is Me, this is Me, this is really Me,

          as Saint Catherine of Sienna said,

          “My Me is God.”

Thou knowest Thyself by Thyself, O Highest Purusha,

                Sender forth of beings, Light of the Shining Ones,

                Ruler of the World!"

                                                        - Bhagavad Gita

          God’s love does not dwell in cowardly hearts. But before one is called to the games of God there are many lives to pass through, many births and deaths.  

          Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, the Holy Samurai, is not made in a single lifetime, and anyway it was never your choice in the first place, you've been slowly cooking in the crucible for eons, for many lifetimes (all contained in this life time, in this moment).  

          HE, the Bright One, can only exist through your sacrifice, through your courage and through your imagination. Some say, at the end you become one with Her into eternity. That’s a nice thought, but I wouldn’t bank on it...who knows? It’s not important. It's a hell of a trip.

          It is true! I have seen the One, I have been to the Games of God. I hope you see the One someday, But it is unlikely. A few are chosen and don't make it home again. Some founder in madness or start religions. God couldn't care less.  

          The experience was sublime. I did not become better for it, but I was forever changed. The vision left deep scars in my heart, sometimes they open and bleed. As for the ‘Games’, that vision is beyond description, it is not less than the vision of Sublime Being, of the expanding-contracting cell of human consciousness.  

          I have been to the periphery, to the outer grid of human consciousness. Others were there. I heard their voices, and whispers, heard the music, saw the light patterns of human consciousness shifting with the moods and dramas of human thought and action.  

          Talk about sublimity!

          I am utterly in love with the absconded ONE,

          but I do not deny the Other, how could I  be so presumptuous?  

          To enjoy the beauty and warmth of a female is to taste her otherness, to smell her otherness, to feel her otherness. To feel the excitement of otherness as autumn slides into winter is about as much as I can stand. But I do not linger at the gate of the female. Like Ramakrishna, I enter the gate of the male. With all due love and respect, with all appreciation of Her beauty, nevertheless, I follow the way of the male. The majapurusha.  

          But I tell you, there is only One.  

          Wherever you go, there you are, you have never left home, but if you must go; go where your nature leads, follow your own bliss. Stay in the moment as much as possible without making another religion out of it. It is enough to be there...one, whole, and free.

     "For there everything is transparent, nothing dark, nothing resistant; every being is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth; light runs through light. And each of them contains all within itself, and at the same time sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is all, and each all, and infinite the glory.

     Each of them is great; the small is great: the sun is great. There, is all the stars and all and every star again is all the stars and sun. While some one manner of being is dominant in each, all are mirrored in every other  one. "          

                                                         - Plotinus, Enneads.

          We have not been pushed to the brink of annihilation for no good reason. This is a place of radical transformation. Civilization as we have known it, the chrysalis, will fall away, or get blown away. Perhaps the Creative, Nature Herself, doesn't know what we will do, given the options at our dis­posal, how we will express the reborning, write the new plot and act it out. There seems to be a holding of breath in the heavens. Perhaps there will be a sigh that such an extraordi­nary creature, given such power, could think of nothing but the chase and the scam, the torture of its own innocents and other creatures, interminable wars, constant intrigues and jailings, all that possessive posturing and endless proliferation of junk.  

          The human seems unable to come up with a new idea of itself. For all the brilliance of its inventions, humanity is still lost in the primeval struggle for existence, this, despite ac­cess to a plethora of a tools methods means and inspirations to play and dance and experience something of the wonder and beauty of it all, and even to have access through memory and imagination to the 'Thing  Which  Is.'  

          Industrial-merchant civilization seems not to be friendly to the idea that the pursuit of happiness ( and its finding ) is not only a vague notion on the part of some gentle­man farmers on the Eastern shores of North America in the last part of the eighteenth century, but is the cultural manifesta­tion of hundreds of years of hope and aspiration through horrors of war and drought and plague.. . that a new culture was suc­cessfully formed around that idea; the concept that life is a dance, a game of light, to be delighted in for all of its terrors, a pursuit of happiness.  

          At the brink of destruction it may come as a collective flash, ". . . in the wink of eye. . .that,  

                "...all is well

                and all manner of things

                shall be well."       

- Nick Nickolds, 2004