“In every encounter, God asks: ‘Adam, where are you? Where do you stand? How is it with you?’ To answer this question, a person must be willing, lucid, transparent. Once someone has left behind the habitual prayers of childhood and has entered into the personal encounter, there is no way back. He must live in the light of God and expose and entrust himself to the light ever more unconditionally.”

–Adrienne von Speyr

“Every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis; for at every moment we are called upon to make an all-important decision–to choose between the way that leads to death and spiritual darkness and the way that leads towards light and life; between interests exclusively temporal and the eternal order; between our personal will, or the will of some projection of our personality, and the will of God. …Here the aim is primarily to bring human beings to a state in which, because there are no longer any God-eclipsing obstacles between themselves and Reality, they are able to be aware continuously of the divine Ground of their own and all other beings; secondarily, as a means to this end, to meet all, even the most trivial circumstance of daily living without malice, greed, self-assertion, or voluntary ignorance, but consistently with love and understanding. …For the lover of God, every moment is a moment of crisis.”

–Aldous Huxley

“If we remember that every encounter with God and every deep encounter with man is a judgment, a crisis, we would seek God both more whole-heartedly and more cautiously. We would not be bitter if this encounter did not immediately take place. We would approach God with a trembling heart. In this way we would avoid many disappointments, many useless efforts, because God would not give himself to us if we could not bear the encounter. He prepares us for it, and sometimes by a long wait….

“Let us be careful not to seek mystical experience when we should be seeking repentance and conversion. That is the beginning of our cry to God. ‘Lord, make me what I should be, change me whatever the cost.’ And when we have said these dangerous words, we should be prepared for God to hear them. And these words of God are dangerous because God’s love is remorseless. God wants our salvation with the determination due to its importance. And God, as the Shepherd of Hermas says, ‘does not leave us till he has broken our heart and bones.'”

–Anthony Bloom

I somehow ended up on the mailing list for the Plough Reader. There’s some fluffiness, but much more food for thought there; the above is only a small sample.


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