The Experience of God, David Bentley Hart

We see the mystery, are addressed by it, given a vocation to raise our thoughts beyond the apparent world to the source of its possibility. In time, though, we begin to seek power over reality and so become less willing to submit our minds to its power over us. Curiosity withers, ambition flourishes.

• We turn from the mystery of being to the availability of things, 
• from the mystery of consciousness to the accessible objects of cognition, 
• from the mystery of bliss to the imperatives of appetite and self-interest.

We gain what we can take by relinquishing what we can only receive as a gift, and obtain power by forgetting that dimension of reality we cannot dominate but can approach only when we surrender ourselves to it. And late Western culture may well be the social order that has ventured furthest away from being in its quest to master things.

The path to true wisdom, then, is a path of return, by which we might find our way back to the knowledge of God in our first apprehension of the inseparable mysteries of being, consciousness, and bliss. Our return to that primordial astonishment, moreover, must be one in which we bring along all we learned in departing from it, including the conceptual language needed to translate wonder into knowledge. We shall then be able clearly to see

• how the contingency of finite existence directs our thoughts toward an unconditional and absolute reality, and
• how the intentional unity and rationality of the mind opens up to an ultimate unity of intelligibility and intelligence in all things, and
• how the ecstatic movement of the mind and will toward transcendental perfections is a natural awareness of an ideal dimension that comprehends and suffuses the whole of existence.

More simply,

• we shall arrive at a way of seeing that sees God in all things, a joy that encounters God in the encounter with all reality;
• we shall find that all of reality is already embraced in the supernatural, that God is present in everything because everything abides in God, and that God is known in all experience because it is the knowledge of God that makes all other experience possible.

That, at least, is the end we should seek. For the most part, though, we pass our lives 

• amid shadows and light, 
• illusions and revelations, 
• uncertain of what to believe or where to turn our gaze.

Those who have entirely lost the ability to see the transcendent reality that shows itself in all things, and who refuse to seek it out or even to believe the search a meaningful one, have confined themselves for now within an illusory world, and wonder in a labyrinth of dreams. Those others, however, who are still able to see the truth that shines in and through and beyond the world of ordinary experience, and who know that nature is in its every aspect the gift of the supernatural, and who understand that God is that absolute reality in whom, in every moment, they live and move and have their being--they are awake.

2013