In Direct And Inverse Proportions

We experience in God direct proportion with how much we are able to love; we experience God in inverse proportion to the unwarranted attachments that we may have toward everything outside of God.

There is a very mistaken proposition that states that in order to directly experience God we have to renounce everything except God, and that it is only when our minds are shut off from the world that we can be filled with God's love for us. But this either-or dichotomy is false. In the first place it is God and God alone who decides when and how to invade us with God's presence, which manifests in the direct experience of love. And while God is jealous of us in the sense that God wants our undivided attention, just as any true lover wants of their beloved, to even think that mystical union only happens if we are suspended from our senses is both impossible and ludicrous. God might very well become mystically present to us directly even as we are being deeply embraced by some aspect of the world around us, which God has made, and which God might be using at that moment to intervene in our lives.

We should all be deeply suspicious and disturbed by people who say that the only way to experience God is to be stripped of attachment to God's Creation. People who say this are confused at best, and antisocial religious misanthropes who are deeply psychologically deficit at worst, and very likely to be people who are incapable of love in any case. Unfortunately, the church both has these types in great numbers, and blesses this nonsense, which is not supported by the Word.

When William Stringfellow was purportedly asked whether the Pope was infallible he responded, 'When he follows the Word he is.'

-Anon.