
Daily Life as Spiritual Exercise
18 MayDaily Life as Spiritual Exercise (1971), Durkheim writes,
When we speak of Transcendental Being and the transforming and liberating unity of the Ground, the question inevitably arises; is it not presumptuous to inquire into that which so obviously touches the deepest mystery of life and of man, and which is beyond all rational comprehension? Indeed, such inquiry is permissible only if approached with the utmost delicacy. Even so, we should not be diffident before this great mystery that our diffidence makes us blind and deaf to essential being…. Even so, we have happily, the right to remind ourselves that the mystery of the Ground of Greater Life constantly penetrates our little personal life, with its continuous summons and its power of renewal. …Divine Being stirs in our darkness, bestowing on us, when at last the depths begin to stir and the veil of conceptualization falls, its illuminating experiences. …The Great Experience—which leads to Metanoia, to a reversal of the old life and to a new birth—contains two elements; the experience of oneness, in the stillness of which all things are rendered down, and the encounter with the special way in which we as individual beings participate in Being as Greater Life, which drives forward with dynamic force into the ‘light of the world.’