Nielsen’s Nook

Nielsen’s Nook
Nielsen’s Nook
Contemplative, reflective, and irenic we pray.
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Charles Williams on true union

Will Nielsen
October 12th, 2007
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For your contemplation:

‘If I in-thee’d myself as thou dost in-me thyself.’ This is one of Dante’s most concise and most intense sayings, and one of the most significant. … Something of [true union and communion] is known, on occasion, in the life of lovers; not, perhaps, in many; not, certainly often. There is some kind of experience which can only be expressed by saying: ‘Love you? I am you.’ This is a natural thing; but then there is the moral duty. It is the moral duty of lovers, as they certainly at moments know, to plunge with love into each other’s life — bringing power: power to resist temptation, to reject, to affirm, to purify, to pray. ‘I will pray for you’ is a good saying; a better — ‘I will pray in you.’ This indeed is like the nature of the prayers for which the souls on the mountain terraces are asking. Those on earth fulfill the necessary task. And now it is more than ritual prayers; it is the life and inter-life of souls. 1

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1 Williams, Charles. The Figure of Beatrice (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2005), 204.

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