Humility is indeed a basic spiritual virtue. It comes to us when we do not know how to proceed, when all previous teachings and certainties have been found to be unavailing. When we are in the suffocation darkness of our own hell, we are suddenly confronted by a light of radiance that illuminates our total situation. We at once accept its glow and loving warmth with relief; but as it leads us on to the fuller light, it makes demands on us. It requires nothing less than a complete change of heart, so that we may take up the darkness of the world around us in the light that had so recently lightened our own darkness ... As our depths are illuminated, so we take our place in the light of God. It is then that we know the meaning of love ... and then, it radiates to the entire cosmos as a beam of the love of God. The light of God in this way releases the love that is native to the soul but usually imprisoned in it ... To learn this love, not merely intellectually, but also in experience, is the object of all life.
We have lost sight of the original harmony: If you could hear the sound that is produced by the sunflower as it keeps on turning its head toward the sun, the friction between the flower and air, and if you could hear the sound produced by the galaxies, you would hear the symphony of the spheres; and you would realize that this symphony is based upon a basic harmony, the harmony of the spheres.
