The Pursuit of God

Chapter 1: Following Hard after God

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Lift up your heart to God with a humble impulse of love; and have himself as your aim, not any of his goods. 16 Take care that you avoid thinking of anything but God himself, so that there is nothing for your reason or your will to work on, except God himself. . . . This is the work of the soul that pleases God most. 17 Again, he recommends that in prayer we practice a further stripping down of everything, even of our theology. “For a simple reaching out directly towards God is sufficient, without any other [objective] except himself.” Yet underneath all his thinking lay the broad foundation of New Testament truth, for he explains that by himself he means “the God who made you and ransomed you, and has in his grace called you to this [endeavor].” 18 And he is all for simplicity: If we would have religion “wrapped up and enfolded in a single word, so as to have a better grasp of it, take just a little word, of one syllable rather than two, for the shorter it is the [more] it is in agreement with this exercise of the spirit. Such a one is the word God or the word love .” 19 When the Lord divided Canaan among the tribes of Israel, Levi received no share of the land. God said to him simply, “I am your portion and your inheritance” (Num 18:20), and by those words made him richer than all his brothers,

16 Goods – His gifts, benefits, and blessings. 17 The Cloud of Unknowing , ed. James Walsh, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1981), 119–20. 18 The Cloud of Unknowing , 133. 19 The Cloud of Unknowing , 133–34.