Jeanne Marie Bouviers de la Motte Guyon (1648-1717).

It is like a person who possesses in her ground an inexhaustible treasure, without ever thinking of her possession; she does not know her riches (...). Past, present and future are there in a manner of a present and eternal moment, not as prophecy, which regards the future as a thing that is to come, but everything is seen in the present in the eternal moment, in God himself; without knowing how one sees or knows it; (...) From this ground, so lost, these wonders proceed. Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, P.122.

When my spirit had been enlightened, my soul was placed in an infinite wideness. (...) Before it, everything gathered and was bound together within, and I possessed God in my ground and in secrecy of my soul; but then I was possessed by him, in such a wide, pure and infinite way that there is nothing similar. (...) I was as if sunk in the sea. Formerly thoughts and intentions did become lost (...). It (the soul) lost itself with every day in him, the way one sees a river that loses itself in the ocean (...). Ibid., P.122,123.

My prayer was always the same: not a prayer in me, but in God (...). It is no longer a prayer but a state of which I can say nothing because of its great purity. (...) it surpasses all expression. (...) Everything is God, and the soul becomes aware of nothing but God. It has no more perfection to desire, has no more striving, no interval, no union; everything is consumated in unity, but in such a free, light, natural way that the soul lives in God and from God, as naturally as the body lives by the air it breathes. Ibid., P.123.

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Last updated: 1999/04/05