It is terrifying, this immense sea that is God. What will he do with us? Where will he carry us? He is Abba, says ,Jesus. Fear not, trust him.

Everything depends, too, on our handing ourselves over to God's loving designs, asking for no tangible certainties.

When Jesus tells us that we must call God Abba, and live as his children, he is demanding of us this decentralization and `ek-stasy', this standing-out-of-self, in order to transfer our existence, our meaning, our importance, our weight, to the Father. It is a summons to the most radical self-denial.

for God to `touch' me, however lightly, means I suffer. I begin to shrivel up, to experience something of my sinfulness and total helplessness. I will come to realise with poignant intensity that I know nothing about God, that to me he has not yet revealed hisname. I had thought I was spiritual, contemplative even; and now I see that I am an empty

Jesus has become our Way, our Truth and our Life because he declined to have any way of his own, any truth or reality of his own, only the Father's.

Faith is not a thing of the mind; it is not an intellectual certainty or a felt conviction of the heart. It is a sustained decision to take God with utter seriousness as the God of my life. It is to live out each hour in a practical, concrete affirmation that God is Father and he is `in heaven'. It is a decision to shift the centre of our lives

It is not easy to speak properly of a deep human relationship: how much more so when one of the partners is God.

Prayer is not just one function in life, not even the most important function; it is life itself. We are truly alive, truly human, only when our whole life is prayer.

By staking everything on Jesus' guarantee and trying to live always in the faith that God is Father, we come to know what he is: that he is our ground and air, that he is our encompassing and the source of what we are and do.