Why do we rush about… looking for God who is here at home with us, if all we want is to be with him?”

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.

Human contact unties the strait jacket of inner isolation.

Union with God is not something we acquire by a technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God.

God in Christ has taken into Himself the brokenness of the human condition. Hence, human woundedness, brokenness, death itself are transformed from dead ends to doorways into Life.

The prayer word has gradually changed from being like a shield of protection to being like a riverbed at one with the river. The riverbed makes no comment on what is coming from upstream and passing downstream.

From this depth God is seen to be the ground of both peace and chaos, one with ourselves and one with all the world, the ground “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). This depth of silence is more than the mere absence of sound and is the key.

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.

Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human c