The Myth of Arrival

How the Soul Grows by Hunger, Not Possession

There exists, within the damp chambers of the human heart, a persistent and peculiarly seductive heresy. It whispers not of grand apostasies, but of a quiet, desperate hope: the hope of arrival. It is the dream of a final plateau, a sun-drenched terrace overlooking the conquered valleys of the spirit, where the struggle ceases, the questions die, and a permanent, unassailable peace settles like dust in a long-abandoned room. This, the myth murmurs, is the true end of the pilgrimage. Stillness, mastery, a soul comfortably housed within its own sanctified walls.

We clutch at this illusion with the fervor of the drowning. After the tempest of conversion—that shattering collision with the Absolute that leaves the old self in rubble and the new blinking in an unnerving light—we yearn for the calm. We mistake the sudden ceasefire, the eerie quiet after the bombardment of grace, for the peace that passeth understanding. We build altars to that moment, preserve its fading warmth like a guttering candle, convinced we have crossed the final frontier. The soul, battered but seemingly triumphant, sighs: Here, at last. I have arrived.

But the silence never holds. The wind, carrying the scent of distant deserts and unseen battles, always finds the chink in the stained glass. The old ache, the familiar doubt, the serpent of discontent—they do not perish in the blaze of illumination, they merely retreat into the shadows of the newly consecrated temple, waiting.

The mystical consolation, that ineffable union tasted like rare wine on the tongue, evaporates, leaving behind a thirst more profound, a hollow more echoing than before. The breakthrough, so hard-won, reveals itself not as a destination, but as the opening of a steeper, more treacherous path winding up into cloud-shrouded peaks. The plateau, upon closer inspection, is but a ledge. The terrace overlooks only a deeper abyss of unknowing.

This recurrence of the struggle, this cyclical return to the desert after the oasis, feels, at times, like a divine cruelty. A trick. A promise reneged upon. We rail against the fading of the light, the coarsening of the fine linen of consolation into sackcloth. We demand permanence, a spiritual state we can inhabit like a well-appointed room, furnished with certitude and curtained against chaos. We seek to control the timeline of our own sanctification, to impose upon the wild, untamed currents of the Spirit the neat geometry of a Gantt chart.

Yet, this very restlessness, this divine dissatisfaction that pricks us onward when we long only to rest, is the signature of Incarnation. For the Word did not become idea, nor doctrine, nor ethereal principle, but flesh. Blood, bone, sweat, tears… the messy, dynamic, ever-unfolding reality of life itself. God entered the current, not the cul-de-sac. The Love that bent the heavens and pitched its tent among us is not a static monument, but a living fire. It consumes, yes, but in consuming, it transforms. It does not petrify. To love, truly and incarnationally, is to move, to respond, to grow, to suffer the glorious agony of engagement. A love frozen is a love dead.

The Apostle, that bruised and tireless voyager, knew this in his marrow. "Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect," he confessed, the weariness and the fierce hope warring in his voice, "but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own." I press on. It echoes with the grunt of the runner, the straining muscle, the gasp for air. It is the antithesis of arrival. It is the recognition that the prize is not a place to stand, but a Person to pursue, endlessly, through every shifting landscape of the soul. To cease pressing is to cease loving with the totality of the incarnate self.

The seasons of the soul—spring's sudden blossom, summer's fierce light, autumn's melancholy harvest, winter's barren ache—are not deviations from the path, but the path itself. They are the rhythmic pulse of a love that breathes, that expands and contracts, that knows dormancy and furious growth. To demand perpetual summer is to reject the very rhythm of life, the sacred cycle of death and resurrection written into the cosmos and etched onto the heart. The winter of the spirit, when God seems a rumor carried on an icy wind, is not abandonment, but a deeper, more terrible intimacy: the stripping bare required for a greater indwelling. The dryness is not absence, but the preparation of the cracked earth for a rain it cannot yet conceive.

This perpetual exodus, this sacred unrest, demands a surrender far more profound than the relinquishment of vice. It demands the surrender of the timeline. We must release our clenched fist from the calendar of our own holiness. We must abandon the arrogant, if desperate, hope that we can engineer our spiritual maturity, force the flower, command the dawn. Sanctity unfolds in God’s time, which bears little resemblance to the frantic ticking of our anxious chronometers. It is a slow, deep work, often subterranean, visible only in retrospect like the course of a river revealed from a great height. To press on is not to achieve on schedule, but to consent to the journey, however long, however circuitous, however shrouded in fog.

There is a paradox inherent within this spiritual truth that is both exquisite and unsettling. Theosis—deification, union with the Divine—is the very end for which we were made, and yet, having tasted it, we find it not an end at all, but an infinite beginning. Scripture speaks of becoming "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), of being "filled with all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:19), yet this fullness does not satiate—it expands the soul’s capacity for hunger. How, then, does the never-ending journey of the spiritual life reconcile with the orthodox promise of theosis, or the West’s similar concept of Divine union?

The answer lies in the nature of God Himself. Not as a fixed point to be reached, but as an unfathomable ocean into which we wade eternally, the depths ever receding before us. The Eastern fathers understood this well. Gregory of Nyssa, in his Life of Moses, speaks of the soul’s ascent as a perpetual "epektasis", a stretching forward, an endless pursuit of the Infinite. St. John of the Cross teaches “The thicket of God's wisdom and knowledge is so deep and immense that no matter how much the soul knows, she can always enter it further; it is vast and its riches incomprehensible.”¹

The Beatific Vision is not static. It is dynamic, a face-to-face encounter that does not dull the appetite but sharpens it. The closer one draws to the Divine, the more one perceives the inexhaustible mystery; and thus the journey, rather than concluding, intensifies.

This is the nature of theosis: not an absorption into God that annihilates the self, but a participation in His life so total that the soul’s freedom, its unique createdness, is not erased but glorified. And because God is infinite, this participation can never be exhausted. There is always more. More to love, more to know, more to become. The fire that consumes does not reduce to ash, but rather transforms into itself, yet the transformed burns all the brighter, all the hungrier.

The myth of arrival is, ultimately, a denial of the Incarnation’s deepest implication. If God truly inhabits the flux of time and flesh, then so must our journey towards Him. The stable peace we crave is found not in cessation, but in the dynamic tension of the yes uttered again and again into the unknown. It is the peace of the sailor who has stopped fighting the current and learned to trim the sails to the wild, holy wind, knowing the harbor is not a place on the map, but the abiding presence of the Captain within the very timbers of the ship, within the salt-sting on the face, within the relentless, wave-lashed journey itself.

The only true arrival is the perpetual departure, the eternal pressing on, the heart beating in time with the restless, incarnate Love that will not let us rest until we rest, paradoxically, in the beautiful, exhausting, never-ceasing motion of His will. The destination dissolves into the journey, and the journey becomes the only true home. A home forever approached, forever known in the approach, forever alive in the sacred ache of the unarrived.

This is the mysticism of the road, the sacrament of incompleteness. God found not at the terminus, but in the very dust of the pilgrim's sandal, the sweat on his brow, the next step taken in faith across the ever-shifting sands.

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The Spiritual Canticle; Stanza 36, Commentary.

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