A life above ourselves: A blessed delight which is eternally renewed

Jan van Ruusbroec:

"God has given us a life above ourselves, and that is a divine life. It is nothing other than a contemplating and a gazing and a holding to God in bare love, a savoring and a delighting and a melting away in love, and a constant renewal of all this. For there, where we are raised above reason and all our activities in naked vision, we are wrought by the spirit of our Lord. And there we suffer the inworking of God and are illlumined by divine light, just as the air is illumined by the light of the sun and as iron is permeated by the strength and heat of fire. Thus we are transformed and penetrated from splendor to splendor, in the very image of the Holy Trinity . . . There the Father finds us and loves us in the Son, and the Son finds us and loves us with the same love in the Father. And the Father and the Son embrace us in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in a blessed delight which is eternally renewed, ceaselessly, in knowledge and in love, through the eternal birth of the Son from the Father and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit from them both."



Source: The Rhineland Mystics, ed. & tr. Oliver Davies, p. 103