Joy

To experience God is to experience joy, not pleasure. This explains how you might be in pain, and yet be joyful. In fact, to not be able to be open to pain is to not be open God, who sometimes uses pain to transform our lives. Joy and pain are not exclusive of one another, while pain and pleasure are exclusive of one another.

It is tragic when people expect little more than pleasure in their contemplation, which is the most intimate and honest aspect of their life. They lose their peace as they do everything they can to avoid difficulties and pain. The words just and only are added to their prayers as indications of false humility...their inability to be open to God's love in the most trying circumstances of life. Pain cannot touch this highest joy.

People waste great amounts of time and effort in exhaustive and expensive efforts to avoid life's difficulties as if these were evils from which they falsely believe that they ought to be immune. This fickleness is a certain sign of their deep and camouflaged love of their false, fabricated, social self...daydreams designed to undermine the actual work of God's grace.