Giving yourself up to love is falling, with complete abandon, into the hands of the living God. This is the deep, interior prayer for which we have been striving. Here we must let go our dependency on thoughts, words, and images. We go into the beautiful darkness. We stop struggling. We let the angels carry us. We let go even of our yearning for God. Nothing is left except being in God. What could I say that would matter when I am in the heart of God? Contemplation! It is like going to heaven for a while.
Real love is always difficult, as the German poet Rilke said, because "it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for the sake of another, it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances." Eventually, love forces us to turn within. In the Symposium, his meditation on love, Plato called love a child of fullness and emptiness, suggesting that there is a kind of desolation built into every love. There comes a moment in the progress of most loves when lovers feel isolated and unfulfilled, because they have discovered that they cannot find real and enduring meaning by reaching outside themselves, clinging to their lover. . . They may see that it is only by daring to open to the silence at the center of themselves that they can begin to feel the presence of the One whom they have been searching for all along.