I have ascended to the highest in me . . .

I have ascended to the highest in me, and look!
The Lord is towering above that. In my curiosity I have descended to explore my lowest depths,
yet I found God even deeper.
If I looked outside myself, I saw God
stretching beyond the furthest I could see; and if
I looked within, God was yet further within.
Then I knew the truth of what I had read:
In God we live and move and have our being.

--Bernard of Clairvaux

In the infinite reaches of the sky above, and in the bottomless depths of our souls, in the ever-expanding interior space we sometimes occupy in such loneliness, and in the inexhaustible wonder of the Other, in the eternal conflation of the sacred and the profane, in the mystery of our lives and loves, God is present for us to discover and to love. As Julian of Norwich wrote six centuries ago, we exist because God loves us. God therefore loves us in the beginning and now and forever. Let’s not trample God’s preciousness under a cloud of forgetting but enter the cloud of remembrance in the sight of God.