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" "God is pure Being, a waste of calm seclusion…much nearer than anything is to itself in the depth of the heart, but He is hidden from all our senses. He is far above every outward thing and every thought, and is found only where thou hidest thyself in the secret place of thy heart, in the quiet solitude where no word is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy. This is the quiet Desert of the Godhead, the Divine Darkness—dark from His own surpassing brightness, as the shining of the sun is darkness to weak eyes, for in the presence of its brightness our eyes are like the eyes of the swallow in the bright sunlight.
Johannes Tauler (c.1300 – 1361), also known as John Tauler, was a priest and German mystic of the Catholic Church, born in Strasbourg. He belonged to the Dominican order and was a prolific preacher. Along with his friend and contemporary Henry Suso he was one of a triumvirate of thinkers belonging to the Rhineland school, also called The Rheno-Flemish school, of which Meister Eckhart was the founder and supreme proponent. Blessed John Ruysbroeck is also sometimes held to be a mystical teacher of this school and Tauler once travelled to Groenendaal for a meeting with Ruysbroeck.
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It is impossible for us in words to describe the ineffable dignity of the soul, and we cannot in any way comprehend it. If we had here with us a human being in his primal nobility, pure as Adam in paradise in his natural state apart from grace, his simple nature unadorned — that person would be so luminous and pure, so ravishing and richly favoured by God that no one would be able to comprehend his purity nor with his reason conceive of it.
How can reason possibly grasp that immensity beyond all being where the precious food of the Eucharist is, in some marvellous way, made one with us, drawing us wholly to itself and changing us into itself? It is a union more intimate than any that the human mind can conceive, totally unlike any other change, a union more compatible than a tiny drop of water losing itself in the wine-vat and becoming one with the wine, or that of the rays of the sun made one with the sun's splendour; or the soul with the body, the two together making one person, one being. In this union the soul is lifted above the infirmity of its natural state, its own insufficiency, and there it is purified, transfigured and raised above its own powers, its human operations, its very self. Both being and activities are penetrated through and through by God, formed and transformed in a divine manner, the soul's new birth is accomplished in truth, and the spirit, losing all its native incompatibility, flows into divine union.