There is a great axiom when it comes to the work of spirit within the human heart; it is this: the same rose never blooms twice. What this means is that any moment of grace to which we have been gifted -- and, as a result, momentarily lifted out of our spiritual poverty -- is just that: a gift. For whatever reason that the "hand of God" touches us in a given moment, we are made in that same moment a participant in the fullness of wisdom and power that cannot be possessed any more than one can possess the sunlight that warms his or her face. But there dwells within us certain parts of us whose power it is, through imagination, to make of such moments a fully fledged "object" -- an image endowed with the richness of that experience. The mind that creates this image does so, in one manner of speaking, naturally; but there is an unnatural part of that same mind that then goes on living through that image, comparing everything that happens to this image and its imagined fullness; so that due to this process of comparison we spend our time trying to recapture or re-create what once came to us and through us. In the wink of an eye one becomes attached to and dependent upon the very goodness that brought liberation and independence with it.

Of course nothing we can fashion for ourselves from such a mindset can come close to granting us the comfort we once knew; it can't; and this state of self, though it seems not so, is actually good. For how else could we come to understand the subtle relationship between instrument and Musician? How else could we learn to surrender ourselves to the hope of that unseen Touch, if not for fully expiring the hope of things seen...of things that we give ourselves to touch?

God's life is never absent from our own; and it seems the only way we learn this priceless lesson is by seeing where we separate ourselves from his life by searching for Him. Real love is a remarkable thing; it is, at once, forever longing and yet strangely full even in its emptiness. It may be that spiritual maturity, the flowering of the heart, dawns (in us) as we learn to love the absence of God as much as we do his presence -- for how could we possibly know this absence if it weren't for his presence to remind us of that? When these two states are seen as being one and the same, we are never without that which we love...and that loves us more than these words can say.