“Devote yourself earnestly to meditating on the passion and death of our Lord, adoring his precious blood and his sacred wounds. By this shall one endeavor to arouse his love, and herein shall his inner life be made manifest to him; for as a great heap of coals or wood blazes up into a great fire, so shall this pious practice inflame one’s heart. But let a person soon dispense with the figures of his imagination, and with fiery love penetrate through the middle ground of his spirit into its hidden interior. Such a person now works not but God works within him, God alone, in whose hands he rests passive. And yet his former good pious practices still profitably linger in his soul, and light shines upon him from our Lord’s passion; he feels the bitterness of sorrow for his sins; he prays as before for the living and the dead; but all this must now be cast deep into God in great nakedness and singleness of spirit. And when the rays of divine light have broken a way into this soul, thus all noble, almost passive under God, then comes essential Truth, namely, God, and draws the spirit into himself. And his beams are swift as lightning, yea, swift as angels’ flight between earth and heaven, whose speed is above that of the lightning. Nor does even this rightly tell how swift and bright are the rays of God’s love and truth in the soul’s inner life, winning and absorbing the soul, which must refer all back again to God, and be at one with him. Here is indeed the true adorer, that adores God in spirit and in truth (John 4:23). Here true peace is born, and those virtues that lead to it.”
— Fr. John Tauler, O.P.
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