The Meta-Cosmic Adoption Agency for Fatherless Children

We've been speaking of the dynamism between the poles of immanence and transcendence, but at the end of the deity "the transcendent One is the same as the immanent One," which is to say, both "the Way up and the Way down" (Betz, ibid below). 

Thus, it is "the ladder that joins the heights of transcendence to the depths of immanence." (↑) and (↓) are "no longer discrete realities but aspects of a single reality. As such, to find the Logos above is to find him within, and to find him within is to find him above and without." This is the 

unique mediator, who is at once above and below, within and without, immanent and transcendent, first and last, in which (or in whom) all space and time is gathered together, as in... "the still point of the turning world."

It seems to me that this must take the form of a spiral, only one that returns to itself and thus has never really left itself. Which reminds me of both Schuon:

Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite.

And of Voegelin:

"The quest, thus, has no external 'object,' but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable."

Betz continues:

"Indeed, we could say, the more it descends, the more it ascends. For here height and depth are one.... in practice this means that the soul cannot ascend to the heights (and be deified) without descending into the depths of humility..."

"Needless to say we are swimming here in mysteries where paradoxes abound, far from the clearly marked shores." 

Well, good. This is right where we like to float around, just over the subjective horizon that gives way to the unKnown, bypassing the surface of "every shallow anthropology"

into the soul's native depths, where Being and becoming, immanence and transcendence, eternity and time, mysteriously meet...

This is nothing short of "a mystery analogous to the eternal generation of the Son from the Father," the latter taking place in eternity, the former in time. Which are not-two? 

Well, now they aren't, at any rate, for "the Logos figures as the Way from and the Way back to the Father."

Sounds like the Divine Attractor, and why not? "There is a transcendent horizon to human existence" and "another, higher teleology at work in nature," such that "The phenomenal structure of consciousness"

is ordered to what is true, good, and beautiful, that is, to the transcendentals, and implicitly to God...

[T]here is a higher, supernatural teleology at work within [nature], even if it will not be fulfilled in the material universe as we now know it...

Wait what? "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, you are gods?'" Who said that?! For it seems we are by grace what the Son is by nature, so

The answer to the question of who we are is thus bound up with our end.... to fully know what something is we have to know its purpose, in short, what it is for, what it is intended to be.

We are intended to be gods by adoption? The Church is a vast adoption agency? Well, 

Can there even be such a thing as human identity prior to the end? Would it not be like identifying an acorn with an acorn and not an oak tree?

Yes, it would be a bit like that. Shed the acorn and become the tree? Like the acorn must die to itself or something?

Any "'native identity' is an identity that one may be called to leave behind," especially "a mistaken belief about oneself." We apparently must leave the false and reified identity behind & below, and respond "to the call of the Word of God in faith." Thus, "it is precisely by leaving our selves that, paradoxically, we find ourselves."

Should we stop here, or keep swimming?

The latter.

Okay, 

any attempt definitively to assert one's identity apart from  the Logos and the divine perfection of the universe is willy-nilly a rebellion of the creature against the Creator, the past against the future, indeed, one's (present) self against one's (eternal) self.  

The perennial drama of Gen3AOA? Apparently, to the extent that our true identity "exists only in God" as "an analogy of being" "between essence and existence" as opposed to "the presumptive divinity of a usurped identity." 

God or "god." Our choice? Yes, but any such attempts "to assert one's identity independently of the Logos are ultimately illusory."

To be human, accordingly, is to have a fundamentally open-ended identity, inasmuch as one's very being is a being within an analogy (emphasis mine).

And

This kind of identity is an open identity, always new, always coming, always moving toward the accomplishment of new and deeper modes of consubstantiality.

Until IT is accomplished? Well, "the Logos is the only place," "where we essentially exist (all other existence being a kind of falling away from our essence)."

Which implies that all other potential existences are number two, or lower.