Those who are learned love to talk about what they know; and as they know much, they talk much. Yet to hear God, they must LISTEN. The learned often make a storage room of their mind, where so much is stored that there is no room left for God to enter and dwell in it ... The learned like to argue for the sake of arguing. It becomes a game, and in the end they love the argument and miss the opportunity to hear God.
Our disenchantment of the night through artificial lighting may appear, if it is noticed at all, as a regrettable but eventually trivial side effect of contemporary life. That winter hour, though, up on the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it.
