Speaking to the first place of understanding, is it not a law of love always to want to know the beloved object better? We cherish and are interested in everything that enhances the quality of the loved one, everything which shows us new aspects of him, everything that helps us to penetrate more deeply into his soul. Understanding increases love and love needs ever to grow, so it is always trying to feel the charms of the beloved in a new way. If that is a characteristic of human friendship and love, then it will not be different with the love of God, and the truly Christian soul is always anxious to know more about the object of her love, God, and the country where He shall be possessed and enjoyed, Heaven. She loves God above all ad more than herself, He is her sovereign preoccupation, and it is an ever new happiness to know more of Him. Now God reveals himself to us first analogically, in the beings that we live among. Unhappily but few souls are habituated to looking beyond creatures to the Creator. However, we have other than this analogical knowledge which tell us nothing, for example, of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. God Himself has com to our aid and unveiled to our faith the truths of the three Divine Persons, His love for us, and its grand manifestations: the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Eucharist, the sojourn of God in the sanctified soul. He reveals Himself to us in the books of the Old Testament, which speak to us magnificently of God's power, wisdom, justice, loving-kindness, and mercy. The New Testament records the love-able virtues of the Word made flesh: the Gospels must always be the favorite book of a religious soul. Then, to teach us yet more about God and His ways, we have the teachings of the saints. Those who left mystical writings especially tell us high things about God, His attributes, and His dwelling in the soul. The saints can only babble of what they have seen of the Unseeable, understood of the Incomprehensible, learned from the touch of the bodiless Spirit. They touch us deeply, because they are the result of the direct experience of men like ourselves, who tell us, if I may put it so, about the "reaction of the human soul" to the near approach of her highest good and last end, God.
This book Includes the writing of: St. Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), Henry Suso (1295-1366), Richard Rolle (1300-1349), John Tauler (1304-1361), The Author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich (1342-1415), St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), Walter Hilton (d. 1396), St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), St. Teresa (1515-1582), St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622).
Gordon L. Miller's The Way of the English Mystics An Anthology and Guide for Pilgrims presents seven mystics from England: Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, William Law, and George Herbert.
The Christian mystics represented in this book speak to us from different eras of the religious life of England, and they convey a variety of its aspects. Five of them -- Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the anonymous author of author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe -- are drawn from the medieval period, specifically the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the era that could be considered the golden age of English mysticism. George Herbert and William Law represent a later, more secular age -- the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- though their devotional standards and practices were certainly no less rigorous than those of their predecessors. All of these writers, with differing emphases and distinctive forms of speech, convey the message that we exist in the embrace of a mystery, a divine mystery touching us at the very center of ourselves, of which we are but dimly aware. They develop the themes of humility, of inner detachment, of love and service to others and of meditative prayer as aspects of the spiritual life, as ways of realizing and responding to the mysterious touch. These writers also emphasize, in one way or another, that the spiritual life is a process, a pilgrimage. To engage in this inner pilgrimage requires no outer excursions at all. But all such pilgrims, it seems, seek to participate in something larger than themselves -- in the common spirit of fellow pilgrims, or in the universal Spirit that is their deepest stimulus and ultimate goal. The spirit of pilgrimage has always been close to the heart of mysticism. The essence of pilgrimage, whether inner or outer, is not, strictly speaking, the seeking of a certain kind of spiritual experience; it is, rather, the pursuit and practice of living from a deeper dimension. In cultivating a sense of the sacred, the essential and perennial human task is the preparation of a fertile inner field of stillness and spaciousness, so that the holy can take hold and bear fruit. ..... from the introduction
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