Poverty-Participation

St. Peter said, 'We have left all things.' St. James said, 'We have given up all things.' St. John said, 'We have nothing left.' Whereupon Brother Eckhart asks, When do we leave all things? When we leave everything conceivable, everything expressible, everything audible, everything visible, then and then only we give up all things. When in this sense we give up all, we grow aflood with light, passing bright with God.

- Eckhart

In this allowing God to work in it, the soul - having rid itself of every mist and stain of creatures, which consists of having its will perfectly united with that of God, for to love is to labour to detach and strip itself for God's sake of all that is not God - is at once illuminated and transformed in God, and God communicates to it God's supernatural being in such a way that the soul appears to be God, and has all that God has... All the things of God and the soul are one in participant transformation, and the soul seems to be God rather than the soul, and is indeed God by participation.

- St. John of the Cross

When I preach, I usually speak of detachment and say that a person should be empty of self and all things; and secondly, that they should be reconstructed in the simple good that God is; and thirdly, that they should consider the great aristocracy which God has set up in the soul, such that by means of it people may wonderfully attain to God; and fourthly, of the purity of the divine nature.

- Eckhart