There Is Nothing Holy About Ambition

There is no way to push the self into the emptiness that saturates infused contemplative experience. This is not meant in a formal, cononical sense; indeed, many people enter religious orders or formal ministry through an act of the will. Well-intended or not, when it comes to passive contemplative experience this is disingenuous and an affront to emptying the self in order to allow God to act. Who one is, in the deepest sense, cannot accommodate neurosis - the inability to accept reality as it is and to live in it. Ambition in the contemplative life serves only to allow this self to see only those aspects of reality which it can bear to see and no other. And God does not operate within such confines.