Contemplation

Originally published in four books as:
The Mystical Knowledge of God (1917)
The Mystical Life (1917)
Mysticism--True And False (1918)
Divine Contemplation for All (1920)

You Are Called

What a glorious and good thing is mystical life! God desires man to become a being so like Himself, so near His own Divine self, so united to His own Divine goodness, that man may at last live in his body and soul the same Divine life with Him, taste the same Divine joy, take part in the same Divine operations; in a word, really be one with God. God invites me to unite my puny self to the fulness of His Divine being: yes consciously, joyously, by a free choice constantly renewed, with intensity of love to unite myself to Him. The more I do this the more does God repair the crumbling fabric of my nature, building me up upon and into His own Divine essence; building me up into a being wholly supernatural.

In contemplation, with grace intervening, a man finds himself impregnated through and through with a marvelous new element: the Divine life. He is lifted above nature and made wholly Divine and transferred to the family of God, to the society of the Three Divine Persons. The very substance of his soul and even of his body, with their faculties high and low, are filled, invisibly to the eye of sense, with the glory of the Divine Essence, informed by it, coloured and made resplendent with it. As a coloured glass in a cathedral window when a flood of light passes through it; as a sponge in mid ocean filled with salt water; as a roll of cotton-wool dipped in balm; as a piece of iron in a blazing furnace; as a light cloud in the splendour of the setting sun; even so is natural man transfigured and transformed by the grace of God into a new being.

From the text.