“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposed our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely… I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”
“All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered it's surface.”
New Seeds of Contemplation
"For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness... Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance."
New Seeds...
"When we rest in pure emptiness, the love of God swims into us out of the serene darkness of God's abyssal presence like tidal waves crashing into our consciousness in a vast, hushed surf of praise. As we fall back into the confusion of our own desires, judgements, and temptations, a scar is left on our hearts from the divine encounter with who we are and where we belong - this scar burns us and aches within us as we desperately await a moment of pure poverty so well-disposed to receiving gifts given in "rays of darkness". And these moments are rare."
New Seeds...
The abyss that separates the paradise of the Kingdom of Heaven and the hedonistic pleasure-seeking of the flesh must be crossed with a blind leap of ascetic detachmentThe mystical death (complete emptiness; transcendence of all satisfaction and experience to rest in the night of pure and naked faith) is the final mysterious liberation from attachment - from confusion and the multiplicity of needs and wants - where we will live each present moment in emptiness, in freedom, without being limited by the exclusive 'self' that distinguishes us so rigidly from others and from God; it is from here that God will give us unity in and with Himself.