It is an irony that those who are most open to the direct experience of God can at the same time be driven away from the church by...

Contemplative experience is very real, but elusive. It cannot be looked at directly. It is extremely personal yet transcendent. And...

...is that you do not set out to achieve any sort of mastery or exclusivity in anything. You simply want to be your true self. And when...

As long as nothingness is protected and our eyes are not on our self freedom wells up and nothing can stop this flow of love.

It is an unfortunate reality that there are people who claim that the contemplative life requires special aptitudes and that those who do...

There is no way to push the self into the emptiness that saturates infused contemplative experience. This is not meant in a formal,...

Help, O Lord, for good people have vanished; truth has gone from the children of people. Falsehood they speak to one another, with lying...

This experiential awareness is really most simple, although it needs to be approached with a qualified integrity. Contemplative...

True contemplation by its very nature can never produce anxiety, it never creates or fosters any basis for mental illness or anti-social...

The underlying condition of modern society is that it refuses to accept reality for what it is. This is the definition of neurosis....

...lovers of sobreity and obscurity. They prefer all that is quiet and humble and unassuming. They have no taste for excitements. Their...

In The Ascent To Mount Carmel, St. John of the Cross gives a dire warning to his readers. He cautions that while a contemplative’s direct...

In active contemplation, there is a deliberate and sustained effort to detect the will of God in events... - Thomas Merton Contemplatives...

Amor praeter se non requirit causam, non fructum; fructus ejus, usus ejus. Love needs no cause except itself nor fruit save itself; its...

...was in his cell busily at work and wearing a hairshirt when Abba Ammonas came to him. When Ammonas saw him wearing a hairshirt he...

Sooner or later there comes a temptation for the majority of those who have experienced God in the contemplative life to turn in on...

The chances of recognizing the full extent of one's own unconscious conformity to the prejudices of the society in which you are raised...

The transition we have just described, the discovery of God as present to the inmost depths of our being, is in reality the shift from an...

How shall I think about God and what is God? And to this I can only answer you, I do not know. With your question you have brought me...