Our awareness of God is a syntax of the silence in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us. It is the afterglow of years in which soul and sky are silent together, the out-growth of accumulated certainty of the abundant, never-ebbing presence of the divine. All we are called to do is to let the insight be able to listen to the soul's recessed certainty of its being a parenthesis in the immense script of God's eternal speech.
The meaning of the contemplative life -- of all spiritual life -- is love. Love is at once the origin, the means, and the goal of human spirituality, and when seen through spiritual eyes, the meaning of life in its entirety is love. God's love is endless, boundless without qualifications. Love must create, and we human beings and all the rest of creation are continually born in and from God's love. Creation brings forth diversity and separation. This permits a sense of "me and you," "I and thou," lover and beloved. In other words, we are created as unique individuals so that we may love God and one another. Love is the reason for our being. In our individuality and separateness, each of us is given a longing for re-union, a yearning for the greater fulfillment of love. In the endless movements of love, there is delicate beauty, majestic power, unbearable joy and considerable pain -- and freedom.