Our End and Perfect Bliss

For then that prayer of our Savior will be perfectly fulfilled in us, in which he prayed to the Father for his disciples, saying, “that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and they in us”; and again, “that they all may be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us.” This will happen when that perfect love of God, with which “he first loved us,” has passed into the feelings of our heart as well, through the fulfillment of this prayer of the Lord, which we believe cannot possibly be in vain. And this will come to pass when God is all our love, and every desire and wish and effort, every thought of ours, and all our life and words and breath; and when that unity which already exists between the Father and the Son, and the Son and the Father, has been poured into our hearts and minds. Then, as he loves us with a pure, sincere and unbreakable love, we too may be joined to him by a lasting and inseparable affection, being so united to him that whatever we breathe or think or speak is God. For then, as I say, we reach that end of which we spoke before, which the same Lord in his prayer hopes may be fulfilled in us: “that they all may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they also may be made perfect in one”; and again, “Father, I desire that those whom you have given me may also be with me where I am.” [a]

This, then, ought to be the goal of the solitary; this should be his whole aim: that it may be granted him to possess, even in the body, an image of the bliss to come, and to begin in this world to have a foretaste of a kind of pledge of that heavenly life and glory. This, I say, is the end of all perfection: that the mind, cleansed of all fleshly desires, may be lifted daily toward spiritual things, until the whole life and all the thoughts of the heart become one continuous prayer.