How Can We Keep God Always in Mind?

Our bewilderment, the wondering awe at the earlier conference that brought us back again, grows still greater. For the more the urging of this teaching fires us with desire for perfect bliss, the deeper we fall into despair, since we do not know how to seek or obtain the training for such lofty heights. So we beg you to bear with us patiently while we explain what we had begun to turn over in a long meditation as we sat in our cell; for it may perhaps need to be set out and unfolded at some length. We know that your holiness is not at all troubled by the weaknesses of the weak, which ought to be laid open for this very reason, that what is out of place in them may be corrected. [a]

Our idea, then, is this. The perfection of any art or system of training must begin with some simple first steps and grow used at first to fairly easy and tender beginnings. Fed and trained little by little with a kind of reasonable milk, it grows up, and so by degrees, step by step, climbs from the lowest depths to the heights. When by these means it has entered on the plainer principles and, so to speak, passed the gates at the entrance of the profession, it will in due course reach the inmost shrine and lofty heights of perfection without difficulty. For how could any boy manage to pronounce the simplest joining of syllables unless he had first carefully learned the letters of the alphabet? Or how can anyone learn to read quickly who is still unfit to join together short and simple sentences? And by what means will one poorly taught in the science of grammar reach eloquence in rhetoric or the knowledge of philosophy? So for this highest learning too, by which we are taught even to cling to God, I have no doubt there are some foundations of the system. They must first be firmly laid, and afterwards the towering heights of perfection may be set and raised on them. We have a slight idea that these are its first principles: that we should first learn by what meditations God may be grasped and contemplated, and next that we should manage to keep a very firm hold of this subject, whatever it is, which we do not doubt is the height of all perfection.

And so we want you to show us some material for this remembrance, by which we may grasp the thought of God and always keep it in mind. Then, keeping it always before our eyes, when we find we have slipped away from him we may at once be able to recover ourselves and return to it, and may manage to lay hold of it again without any delay from wandering around the subject and searching for it. For this is what happens. We wander away from our spiritual contemplation and come back to ourselves as if waking from a deadly sleep. Fully roused, we look for the subject matter by which we can revive the spiritual remembrance that has been destroyed, and we are held up by the delay of the search itself before we find it. We are drawn aside once more from our effort, and before the spiritual insight comes about, the purpose of heart we had formed has vanished. This trouble is sure to happen to us because we do not keep something special firmly set before our eyes, like a principle to which the wandering thoughts may be called back after many digressions and various excursions, and, if I may use the expression, enter a quiet harbor after long storms. So it comes about that the mind, constantly hindered by this lack of knowledge and this difficulty, is always tossed about aimlessly among various matters, as if drunk. It cannot keep a firm hold for any length of time even of something spiritual that has come to it by chance rather than by set purpose; for as it is always receiving one thing after another, it does not notice where each began or came from, or even where it ends.