Dorothy Sayers & Raymund Schwager?

Reading the Meditation of the Day in the Magnificat this morning I was struck by how Dorothy Sayers captured the major essence of Raymund Schwager's book that I have been promoting here for all to read, Banished from Eden - Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation.

I the image of the Unimaginable
In the place where the Image and the Unimagined
are one,
The Act of the Will, the Word of the Thought,
the Son
In whom the Father's selfhood is known to Himself,
Speak to Man in the place of the Images.
You that We made for Ourself in Our own image,
Free like Us to experience good by choice,
Not of necessity, laying your will in Ours
For love's sake creaturely, to enjoy your peace,
What did you do? What did you do for Us
By what you did for yourselves in the moment
of choice?
O Eve My daughter, and O My dear son Adam,
Try to understand that when you chose your will
Rather than Mine, and when you chose
to know evil
In your way and not in Mine, you chose for Me.
It is My will you should know Me as I am -
But how? for you chose to know your good as evil,
Therefore the face of God is evil to you,
And you know My love as terror, My mercy
as judgment,
My innocence as a sword; My naked life
Would slay you. How can you ever know Me then?
Yet know you must, since you were made for that;
Thus either way you perish. Nay, but the hands
That made you, hold you still; and since you
would not
Submit to God, God shall submit to you,
Not of necessity, but free to choose
For your love's sake what you refused to Mine.
God shall endure, and what man chose to know
God shall know too - the experience of evil
In the flesh of man; and certainly He shall feel
Terror and judgment and the point of the sword;
And God shall see God's face set like a flint
Against Him; and man shall see the Image of God
In the image of man; and man shall show
no mercy.
Truly I will bear your sin and carry your sorrow,
And, if you will, bring you to the tree of life,
Where you may eat, and know your evil as good,
Redeeming that first knowledge. But all this
Still at your choice, and only as you choose,
Save as you choose to let Me choose in you.

Who then will choose to be the chosen of God,
And will to bear Me that I may bear you?

Dorothy L. Sayers (+ 1957) was a renowned British dramatist, novelist, poet, and Christian essayist.

As daughters and sons of those very first humans, "O Eve My daughter, and O My dear son Adam," we continue, in this generation, to feel the weight of "what you did for yourselves in the moment of choice?" Read Banished from Eden to grasp the mimetic weight of choice.