The Kingdom

In her book titled Abba Evelyn Underhill beautifully expresses what it means to be in the kingdom of God and for the King of that kingdom to be in us:

"The prayer is not that we may come into the Kingdom, for this we cannot do in our own strength. It is that the Kingdom, the Wholly Other, may come to us, and become operative within our order; one thing working in another, as leaven in our dough, as seed in our field. We are not encouraged to hope that the social order will go on evolving from within, until at last altruism triumphs and greed is dethroned: nor indeed does history support this view. So far is this amiable programme from the desperate realities of our situation, so unlikely is it that human nature will ever do the work of grace, that now we entreat the Divine Power to enter history by His Spirit and by His saints; to redeem, cleanse, fertilize and rule. Nor is this tremendous desire, this direct appeal to the Transcendent, that of one or two ardent and illuminated souls: it is to be the constant prayer of the whole Church, voicing the one need of the whole world. 'We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only so, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit.' [1 Romans viii, 22, 23. 29]

"The world is not saved by evolution, but by incarnation. The more deeply we enter into prayer the more certain we become of this. Nothing can redeem the lower and bring it back to health, but a life-giving incursion from the higher; a manifestation of the already present Reality. 'I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world': and this perpetual advent—the response of the eternal Agape to Eros in his need—is the true coming into time of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Pentecostal energy and splendour is present to glorify every living thing: and sometimes our love reaches the level at which it sees this as a present fact, and the actual is transfigured by the real.

"What we look for then is not Utopia, but something that is given from beyond: Emmanuel, God with us, the whole creation won from rebellion and consecrated to the creative purposes of Christ. This means something far more drastic than the triumph of international justice and good social conditions. It means the transfiguration of the natural order by the supernatural: by the Eternal Charity. Though we achieve social justice, liberty, peace itself, though we give our bodies to be burned for these admirable causes, if we lack this we are nothing. For the Kingdom is the Holy not the moral; the Beautiful not the correct; the Perfect not the adequate; Charity not law."