(mystical union) “Far from implying some idea of attenuation, we use the term to mean the strengthening and purification of the reality and urgency contained in the most powerful interconnections revealed to us in every order of the physical and human world. … By virtue of the powerful Incarnation of the Word, our soul is wholly dedicated to Christ and centered upon Him.”
“How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the synthesis of successive influences in which we are for ever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.”
“To cleave to God hidden beneath the inward and outward forces which animate our being and sustain it in its development, is ultimately to open ourselves to, and put trust in, all the breaths of life. We answer to, and ‘communicate’ with, the passivities of growth by our fidelity in action. Hence, by our desire to undergo God, we find ourselves brought back to the lovable duty to grow.”
“As in the matter of the saving value of our human endeavor, our mind wants a justification for its hopes in order to surrender itself to them more completely.”
“A religion which is judged to be inferior to our human ideal—in spite of the marvels by which it is surrounded—is already condemned.”
“If he is to practice to the full the perfection of his Christianity, the Christian must not falter in his duty to resist evil. On the contrary, he must fight sincerely and with all his strength, in union with the creative force of the world, to drive back evil—so that nothing in him or around him may be diminished.”
“To find and to do the will of God (even as we diminish and die) does not imply either a direct encounter or passive attitude. … I can only unite myself to the will of God (as endured passively) when all my strength is spent, at the point where my activity, fully extended and straining toward betterment, finds itself continually counter-weighed by forces tending to halt me or overwhelm me.”
“The formula for renunciation, if it is to be total, must satisfy two conditions: 1) It must enable us to go beyond everything there is in the world; 2) And yet at the same time compel us to press forward (with conviction and passion) the development of the same world. Speaking in general, Christ gives Himself to us through the world which is to be conserved in relation to Him.”
“Nemo dat quod non habet. How would man give himself to God if he did not exist? What possession could he transfigure by his detachment if his hands were empty? … Your essential duty and desire is to be united with God. But in order to be united, you must first of all be—be yourself as completely as possible. And so you must develop yourself and take possession of the world in order to be.”
“It is a truly Christian duty to grow, even in the eyes of men, and to make one’s talents bear fruit, even though they be natural.”
“In the general rhythm of Christian life, development and renunciation, attachment and detachment, are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they harmonize, like breath in and out.”
“Matter is not just the weight that drags us down, the mire that sucks us in, the bramble that bars our way. It is simply the slope on which we can go up just as well as go down.”
“Immersion and emergence; participation in things and sublimation; possession and renunciation, crossing through and being borne onwards—that is the two-fold yet single movement which answers the challenge of matter in order to save it.”
“The man who abandons himself to the divine milieu feels his inward powers clearly directed and vastly expanded by it with a sureness which enables him to avoid the reefs on which mystical ardor has so often foundered.”
“God pushes to its furthest possible limit the differentiation among the creatures He concentrates within Himself. At the peak of their adherence to Him, the elect also discover in Him the consummation of their individual fulfillment.”
“A first step is to see the divine omnipresence in which we find ourselves plunged as an omnipotence of action. God enfolds us and penetrates us by creating and preserving us.”
“What is the supreme and complex reality for which the divine operation moulds us? It is the quantitative repletion and the qualitative consummation of all things: it is the mysterious Pleroma, in which the substantive One and the created many fuse without confusion in a whole which, without adding anything essential to God, will nevertheless be a sort of triumph and generalization of being.”
“All the communions of a life-time are one communion. All the communions of all men, present, past, and future, are one communion.”
“Nothing is more concentrated or more fleeting—more fused with things or at the same time more separable from them—than a ray of light.”
“The perception of the divine omnipresence is essentially a seeing, a taste, that is to say a sort of intuition being upon certain superior qualities in things.”