When God leaves us to our own poor efforts, we are obliged to have endless recourse to new considerations in order to keep up our prayer and quicken our love.  We feel constrained to vary the subjects of our meditation, to have recourse to new thoughts, to pass continually from knowledge to love and from love to knowledge, from considerations to affections, from words to fleeing moments of quiet and silence.  We cannot dwell in the sweet repose of the Beloved.  We cannot linger long in the heaven of infinite Love; we must always return to the land of faith.  It would even be more exact to say that, left to ourselves, all we can do is lift our eyes to the blessed kingdom of peace and of silence, and desire it ardently.  And even the desires, the first aspirations toward that divine prayer, the first calls coming from presentiments that are still very secret, are already fruits of the Holy Spirit who, from afar, puts souls on the way toward the mysterious dwellings.  Thence come these oscillations, those reflections, those crude supports that our characteristics of our poor prayer when the Holy Spirit leaves to our human way, so utterly disproportionate to an exercise so divine. 

But once God opens the flood-gates of heaven and kindles in us a burning fire, a great flame, we have only to let ourselves be submerged and inflamed, led on to ever new heights and depths.  At those summits where grace envelopes and pervades us totally, let us allow ourselves to be carried constantly along, even more and more profoundly, by the Spirit of Love.  Father Thomas Philippe ‘The Fire of Contemplation’