This is how everyone today loves themselves: they want to live with God in consolation, in wealth and in splendour, and to share in the delight of his glory. We all wish to be God with God. But, God knows, there are few enough of us who want to live as men and women with his humanity or to bear his cross with him, and to be crucified with him in order to pay for the sins of the whole world…

The deepest essence of the soul

Now understand the deepest essence of the soul: what the soul is. The soul is an essence which is transparent to God and for which God too is transparent And the soul is more than this: it is an essence which wants to give delight to God, and which preserves its worth as long as it does not fall away to things which are alien to it, and which are unworthy of it. And when the soul preserves its worth, then it becomes a groundless abyss where God is his own delight and in which he forever takes pleasure in himself in the highest degree, as the soul does for ever in him. The soul is the way that God goes when he proceeds from his depths to his liberty, and God is the way the soul goes when it too enters its liberty, that is into his ground, which is beyond the reach of all things but the soul’s depths. And as long as God is not wholly her own possession, she will not be satisfied.

Hadewijch of Brabant