revealed only in its departure

stairwell accompaniment:Damien Rice-Live

In one past moment I had a ridiculous and scorching vision of a world in which God would never understand, never take me with full seriousness.
But changes come and it was changed. A boundary has been crossed. I have come into a world, or into a Person, or into the presence of a Person. Something expectant, patient, met me with no veil or protection. And the demand which then pressed upon me is not, even by analogy, like any other demand. It is the origin of all right demands and contains them. In its light I can understand them. There was nothing, and had never been anything like this. And now there is nothing except this. Yet also, everything had been like this; only by being like this had anything existed. In this height and depth and bredth the little idea of myself which I previously called me dropped down and vanished. The name me was the name of a being whose existence I had never expected, a being that did not yet fully exist but is being demanded. It is a person (not the person I had thought), and also a thing, a made thing, made to please Another and in Him to please all others, a thing being made at this very moment, without its choice, in a shape I had never dreamed of. Made in a kind of suffering or resplendence or both, yet still I cannot tell if it is in the moulding hands or in the kneaded lump. Or both.