Stepping Out Into The Stars

This direct experience of God is how we know and love God. It is as water is to a fish. It is that for which we are created; nothing else counts. For those who have been drawn to it from childhood, the naming of it turns out to be just what you have known all along. And it is perplexing at both an early age and later in life that the simplicity and obviousness of it all are lost on so many; in early age because you are not sure why others older than yourself seem ignorant of it, and in later life because you cannot mentally comprehend that so many would have traded something so easy, apparent, and precious for something so intensely isolated, shadowed, and clay-baked. You see, you cannot be more of yourself than when God touches you with emptiness and empties you. And everything is peace. And everything is breathless.

Truly God is in this place and I knew it not.

Genesis 13:28

And now my whole being breathes the wind which blows through the belfry, and my hand is on the door through which I see the heavens. The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer. Will it come like this, the moment of my death? Will You open a door upon the great forest and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon, and take me out among the stars?

Thomas Merton