The Diagram Of Love

Salvation is not a choice humanity makes for Christ; it is the fixed and immovable reality of our union in Christ. Salvation is not an attribute God dispenses, nor a benefit He bestows; salvation is the Savior Himself— the person of Christ. It is not brought about by our strenuous resolve, but wrought in the Incarnation, carried through death, and flung open in the Resurrection of Christ. What we anxiously idolize and call a “decision” is, in truth, the after-tremor of a far greater event— the good will of God overrunning the bankrupt will of man, like dawn breaking into the night whether the night consents or not.

“He works in us both to will and to do,” not because we have made ourselves agreeable, but because it pleases Him to do so. Grace is not God waiting politely at the edge of our freedom, hat in hand, hoping we might invite Him in. It is God rescuing our freedom from within the wreckage of itself— liberating us from the illusion that we were ever self-created, self-sustaining, or self-saving.

The Gospel, therefore, does not conclude with a nervous question— Will you accept Jesus?— as though the universe were holding its breath for our reply. It ends with an exclamation point: Jesus has already assumed us into His own life. He has taken our nature into Himself and carried it through death into indestructible reality.

For there is no other life in which we could subsist. All things hold together in Him. To be “saved” is not to be given a second chance, but to awaken— gracefully and with astonishment— to the truth that there never was another place we stood, other than in the One for whom, in whom, and by whom we were made.

Who am I, O Life, that You should descend unto my death?

Who am I, O Assuming One? 

Who, in the foul chambers of my heart,

where life had gone dumb with stench,

and breath no longer answered breath,

where despair smothered like a grave-shroud— was received into the Heart Of Deity. 

Who am I, O Living Mystery? For, yea, I was not wounded nor wandering— I was dead—

mute to Your nearness, deaf to Your song.

Yet You entered me.

Who am I, O New Creation? For, I was scribbling in the rot and dust of death, grasping for my forgotten name. My hands were black, and my form dry and cracked,

crooked and bent. And yet You bent down into the grave with me, and in Your bending I became unbent.

You clothed Yourself in my deadness

and made it Your will. You assumed my disease into Your bones, my night into Your dawn, my end, Your revealing.

And You did not return to me my old name, O Master— You remembered me Yours.

O Crucified One, You carried me through Your passion, sewn to Your breast, and there my deadness met Your death so that death might die. O Living Genius, Mind of God, who could sound Your depths or trace the Diagram of Love?

Who am I, O Resurrection? For You did not rise without me. In Your dying my death died; for the hell I had entered and barred shut from Your entrance became the very gate of paradise itself. For when I descended into hell, You art there; in the valley of death, You are there.

Where could I go from such mercy, O All in the All? In what point on the map are You not? What place is not filled with He

who fills all things with glory? What single solitary soul are You not now, even in this very moment, sustaining within Yourself?

What step could I take that is not already paved in you? What words could I utter,

or song sing, that is not already Your ever-present melody sung over me, O Song of Songs?

For, where could hiddenness hide within Love that enters the grave and makes it the very gates of paradise itself?

Who am I, O Bright Morning Star, for now I wake within the dawn, the morning of Your life. And set before me is Divinity’s Cup— and I do eat, drink, and am drunk on Love eternal. 

Who am I, O Eternal Feast, that I am commanded to eat God with cheer?

My eyes squint from Uncreated Light too heavy for sobriety. They water and narrow; and in their flickering I see: The Diagram of Love comes to me faster than sense can withhold.

O Satiating Cup, I stagger in fullness, in fatness. I wobble in delights, a spectacle, laughing out of tune with death. Let all stare. It matters not— Ecstasy Himself has seized me.

For who am I, O Fruit of Eden, dripping with divine sugar, that I am made to taste Thee as nectar? O Milk and Honey of promise— I am undone and remade in Thine own sweetness.

The mystery of the Incarnation of the Word contains within itself the whole meaning of creation. For He became what we are, that He might make us what He is.

This is no repair, no divine contingency, no Plan B hastily drafted after a fall. Our participation in the New Creation— Christ Himself— is humanity’s completion, not its correction; but our inescapable fulfillment, now revealed in the man Christ Jesus.

For the One in whom, through whom, and for whom all things were made is revealed not as a distant maker, but as One who has always been at home within the work of His hands. The Incarnation does not announce a rare visitation; it unveils His everlasting Presence. He does not merely enter the world— He bears its death. He assumes it.

In this taking-in— terrible, intimate, and irreversible— humanity is drawn into Him, not as a theological idea, but into a living, resurrected reality. Bone, mind, breath, and will are carried into God, passing through suffering and death and raised on the far side of them.

Here the Divine Face is unveiled: the Image after which we were fashioned now looking back at us with human eyes. The Diagram of Love commits forever to a name— the name above all names: Jesus (God Himself IS salvation).

And in this eternal moment, the permanent becomes clear. There is now, and forever, a human man within the Trinity. Humanity is not merely forgiven, but adopted; not merely spared, but taken up— made participants in the eternal circulation of Divine Love: Father, Son, and Spirit.

Since this is so, then creation has reached her meaning. And being human is far more serious— and far more glorious— than we had ever supposed.

The whole debate around hell is extremely backwards. Let me put it this way: we are ALL in danger of hell—because we are all being loved without escape. 

St. Isaac the Syrian speaks without hesitation: “Those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love.” (Ascetical Homily 84)The fire of hell is not something God becomes. It is what God already is—a fire of Love. “All will be tried by this fire,” not because God is wrathful, but because Love is reality and desires our eternal good, no matter the cost to our perverted and distorted will. Reality does not leave illusion intact. It is the same Love that is joy eternal and unshadowed delight that is experienced as torment by the soul that clings to distortion— not because love is vengeful, but because resistance to Reality Himself hurts like hell. Indeed, if observed rightly, we are all tormented even now by this Love every day. Tormented into reality, learning to walk on the real grass; it may hurt at first, but the further up and the further in we go, the more real we become. (The Great Divorce)

C.S. Lewis renders this with quiet precision in The Great Divorce: “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.” And again: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’” Heaven and hell are not rival realms, but rival responses to the same unchanging Reality. Lewis presses it further: “To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth.” Which means hell is not humanity intensified, but humanity refused—a refusal to become real. So the fire is not opposite of mercy. The fire IS mercy— experienced differently.

And no soul that seriously desires joy will ever miss it. The only real question is whether we want a joy so intense that He rips us from our distortions. And in the dawn of eternity, no soul is deprived of joy, for the love of God is without end. But it is true the will that resists is chastened by that love, tried and purified and restored to the joy for which it was made.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom— but play is its everlasting end

Whenever God reveals Himself throughout Scripture, the first human response is almost always fear. Of course it is. Reality Himself has been unveiled. Thus the recurring word on angelic lips: Do not fear. Fear not. Do not be afraid. In the New Testament, the word is phobos— from which we get our transliterated English word phobia. It names the raw terror of the creature when confronted with the Uncreated, the instinct to shrink, to hide, to fall apart under unbearable glory.

And yet, in the announcement of the Incarnation, something decisively changes.

The angels do not deny the fear; they disarm it. “Fear not,” they say, “for behold, I bring you glad tidings of mega joy for all people” (Gospel of Luke 2:10). This is not mere reassurance offered to startled shepherds; it is the proclamation of a cosmic unveiling. The old reflex— terror before God— has reached its limit. 

The birth of Christ marks the end of god-phobia as the final word.

For now God is revealed not in consuming fire, but in the cooings of an infant. Not as One who has arrived from afar, but as the One who was always present, at last disclosed from within the world itself. The dread that once accompanied divine encounter is transfigured— not into control or safety— but into something far stranger and better: not shaking in fear, but trembling in delight.

This should not surprise us. For when Scripture itself gives Wisdom a voice, she does not describe herself as austere or forbidding, but as playful: “I was beside Him, daily His delight, playing before Him always— playing in the world, and delighting in the children of man” (Book of Proverbs 8:30–31). 

Wisdom, it turns out, has always been at play.

Wisdom, then, sets out in fear— for the fear is not imaginary. The Uncreated could unmake us in an instant; we are laughably fragile. The danger is real. The strength is absolute. We are not mistaken to tremble.

And yet— it does not destroy.

The same power that could undo creation chooses instead to bear it, to sustain it, to enter it. God is not safe— but He is good. And goodness, once known, does not produce cowering, but laughter.

Wisdom, then, sets out in fear— but only so that fear may be left behind. What lies beyond it is play: the free, unguarded joy of creatures who know they stand before a terrible goodness that delights in them. Children at ease. Creatures at home. Humanity restored— not to control, but to wonder, and to laughter before its Maker.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom— but play is its end.

Just as there is nothing we have done to arrive where we are— seated IN Him in the heavenlies (Eph 2:6), hidden IN Christ (Col 3:1–3), assumed into the Divine Life—so too there is nothing we could do, nor have done, that could ever undo this union. As St. Paul tells us, “I am convinced— satisfied to arrive at this conclusion— that NOTHING could ever sever us from the Love of God that IS Christ Jesus.”

For it’s not by our achievements, our moral rightness, nor even our own faith, fidelity, or faithfulness to Him— but by His Faith (Faith the Person), His faithfulness, and His fidelity to us that this marvelous Gift is communicated to us as reality. 

The less time we spend nitpicking why others aren’t awakened to this immovable and fixed reality, the more time we can spend simply announcing and enjoying this Glad Message of the Happy God (1 Timothy 1:11, Rhm). In fact, enjoyment is announcement.

The Gospel is not an invitation. It is the communication of a finished act from before time began. It is the ecstatic proclamation—the pure publishing—of what has already been accomplished ONCE FOR ALL in the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ. It doesn’t end with a question mark, but rather an exclamation point— the Exclamation Point Himself, God final Word on the matter! 

This simple and pure enjoyment of the Glad Message IS the awakening— so, tell all your friends. Just say, “Want to hear something crazy?!” God forbid we keep this Divine Smile to ourselves!  

Christ did not suffer and die to satisfy some wrathful thirst in God, as though the Father required payment or the will of the Trinity were divided and bargaining with itself. God needs nothing. The Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ were not the drafting of terms but the invasion of God into our sickness: God entered our ruined condition so that it might be healed from within. What we call wrath and debt are not demands rising in heaven, but the dreadful experience of diseased humanity when it collides with the uncreated life of God— like a ghost discovering that reality is solid. The Cross is not a separate contrivance by which justice is appeased; it is the Incarnation carried straight through death itself, where death had driven its stake into humanity. And there— on the far side of that stake— Christ hangs, fastening our ghostly nature into the unbearable solidity of His life—divine union made flesh. When Christ says, “It is finished,” He is not closing an account but revealing the New Creation— humanity fastened to divinity beyond escape. Salvation, then, is not an exchange made at Calvary, but a transformation wrought from within: what is taken up is healed, and what is healed is raised into the terrible, solid, incorruptible life of God.

The whole of You fills all things, and yet You are entirely outside of everything. You are above all things, Master— above every beginning, above every essence, above the very nature of nature itself. You are beyond all ages and eons, above every light, Savior, beyond every rational essence.

And yet You have entered the world. You are seen by all as approachable in the flesh You assumed. You did not remain distant or abstract. You came near— visible, touchable, known.

You Yourself are entirely and inseparably with us. You make each person a dwelling, and You dwell wholly within everyone. You become a home to all, and in You we dwell— each one of us entirely, Savior. There is no division, no partial presence, no fragment of You withheld.

We are made members of Christ, and Christ becomes our members. Christ becomes my hand and my foot. I become the hand of Christ and the foot of Christ. I move my hand, and my hand is Christ entire— for the divine divinity is indivisible. I move my foot, and behold, it flashes as He Himself.

Do you tremble at this? Do you feel shame? God was not ashamed to become like you. Do not, then, be ashamed to be as He is.

— St. Symeon the New Theologian (Hymns of Divine Eros, Hymn 15, paraphrased)

He who is above and before all worlds, who sings the universes into being with melodies of sheer delight— and sustains them within Himself; who is Himself the Uncreated Light steps into the dawn of a pale blue dot called earth: into time, into a country, a province, into the womb of an unknown virgin— into humanity.

Infinity assumes the smallness of an infant. He who fashioned the ribs of man sustains a heartbeat within His own. The fount of all existence, who needs nothing, nurses milk from the breast—enters hunger, suffering, and tears.

Creator clothes Himself in His own creation and becomes a man— He who is, in fact, the Archetype of Humanity—our beginning and end—origin and fulfillment…

Who can comprehend the mind of God, or trace the diagram of Love that is the man Christ Jesus? Who can measure the depth of His design? Who, in His greatness, becomes the smallest of all—divinity becoming humanity so that humanity might become divinity— that is to say, truly human.

This—the New Creation, Christ Himself—is not a diversion from the original design, nor a fix, but its inescapable fulfillment. The Unapproachable Sandal has come to wash our feet.

So then, be thou washed, and tremble in ecstasy with the seraphim—i n awe, in bewilderment—at this offensive and appalling Love of God: in whom not a single one escapes His mercy; who shepherds all into the pastures of pleasure within His own being—within His own becoming.

For in becoming one, He becomes all—mother and father, sinner and saint, liar and lover. Let the children come. Approach the wondrous mystery of the Incarnate One, then, and be well—for it is right and fitting that we shake and adore with joys unspeakable at such marvels.

The Gospel— unadulterated— is the flat announcement of MEGA (μέγας) joy for all people (Luke 2:10).

The heavenly song— the unveiling of the Incarnation in the birth of Christ— is the declaration that fear is finished business; that minds long darkened and impoverished by despair are no longer condemned to live among their own shadows. God Himself has done the unfathomable He has entered our condition in a body like our own, assuming our humanity in full, so that humanity might assume His Divine Life. In this taking-up, the Imago Dei (the Divine Image) is rediscovered— not as abstraction, but as the Divine Smile returning to human faces.

It is therefore no exaggeration, as Martin Luther so bluntly put it, to say that the whole affair can be nothing other than laughter and joy.