Contact with the Divine Beloved is never complete until some other human being feels more loved and cherished as a result of its contact. Further, as all who have ever communed with the Beloved have discovered, the more deeply you encounter the Divine Lover, the more sensitively you feel the agony of the world; the more you are called to care more, feel more and think more deeply about decay in the social and moral order. You live in a state of radical empathy with all those in need. You are transparent to the agony of the world. Together with the Beloved, you must reach out to allay this suffering, or to do what you can in the light of the perspective of grace and the energy of spiritual partnership.
There is a quiet place I know where nature sings to me the music of the mountains and the forest and the sea. It is not far away, and yet it sometimes seems a place removed from daily life, a distant dream of time and space. I have been lost in city streets, in traffic fast and loud, where sirens scream and nature’s voice is drowned out by the crowd. And so I go to seek that place where I become a part of nature’s song–that quiet place I’ve found within my heart.