Doxology

Dedication

To the Holy Spirit of God who, having been entrusted in me and me in Him, not by my will or want (for I, in the clarity of my good senses, would have never personally made such an emasculating decision – how embarrassing! – how offensive and absurd for a so-called “man of thought” to enslave his mind to God!) but by He who entrusts and is above all faithful to Himself and His own even when His own are not; His choice which, insofar as God and His Spirit dwell outside space and time, is likewise timeless and irrevocable, no matter the protestations and the Jonah-like retreat of he who has been given such a costly weight of glory as this writer who, amid the wilderness of my Faith, everywhere doubted, ridiculed, and even obliquely denied not that God exists, but that He could be even as remotely good as our own spirits intuit and His Holy Word claims; the Spirit of God who, though I knew not He was in me and me in Him, nevertheless led me by the hand – in a similar way that He led Christ – for nearly ten long years throughout the backside of the desert with all its dangers and austerities and futilities and lethalities; the Spirit who even shaded my scalp with the cloud by day and warmed my flesh with the pyre of His love by night until, alas, I gave up striving and kicking against the goads and finally surrendered the last shard of own pitiable faith to Him with the simple confession “I have finally lost it,” God who, availing Himself the opportunity to perfect His power at the lowest ebb of my weakness began bending the very course of the Jordan to where I was hiding under the leaves of the fig in the cleft of the rock, both of us knowing that I had not the strength of body nor endurance of spirit to make yet another perilous journey across the Negev to the land of promise and also, having by now forged me into a weapon of war like John the Baptist, allowed me to make the wilderness my home, the Spirit being well aware of how utterly unfit I am for the civilized life of the cities of intellect; this Spirit – this God who is God through and through – in His goodness brought the promised land to me by the same manner of miracles that daily attended my decade of insolence; miracles which attend all who are called according to His good pleasure. For God is the land of promise. This God – my God – and His all-surpassing love for me of which I am beyond all my contemporaries eternally grateful; grateful to have finally found His rest in which all my futile labors can now realize their purpose: my own Brutal Steed, upon whose coarsy mane I can truly sleep as He sprints across the skies and does in me what my own will, however so obstinate and relentless, could in no way accomplish on its own.