Relinquishment

The practises of solitude and contemplation have never done anything in and of themselves to guarantee results in regard to the lively and direct experience of God. These in no regard vouchsafe any route of access that ends in genuine mystical experience. In the first place the journey itself can only be guaranteed by God, and this can happen only if founded on love, which is always God's love freed up in us and effervescing back to God as the source of that love. As such Christian contemplatives need to relinquish any preconceptions to which their practises are chained, no matter whether these are followed either within or outside of a traditional, institutional setting.