Sorrow must be allowed to blossom into self-forgetful love of God.

that is the ground of even our wounds, is that we easily get caught in judging our own faults and failings. By this I do not mean we should not be able to admit fault, confess failings, make amends. Indeed we should. I’m saying that we get caught in this.

This luminous ground of God, is the ground that upholds all creation, “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” as Dante put it,30 the depths of our own heart, awareness itself utterly steeped in and saturated by God.

John of the Cross came to define deep prayer along similar lines. “Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God.”2 By means of this loving attentiveness one begins to move into God.

One need not have journeyed too far into this silent land to realize that the so-called psychological self, our personality (not what Paul is talking about as hidden with Christ in God) is a cognitive construct pasted up out of thoughts and feelings. A rather elaborate job has been done of it, and it is singularly useful. But our deepest identity,

Simone Weil. “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.”

failure is part of the search for God.

The ground of who we are is completely porous, porous as a sponge immersed in what flows through it.

our struggles are not separate from the luminous vastness within each of