"Often our spiritual quest becomes a search for the right technique, the proper method, the perfect program that can immediately deliver the desired results of spiritual maturity and wholeness. Or we try to create the atmosphere for the 'right' spiritual moment, that 'perfect' setting in which God can touch us into instantaneous wholeness. If only we can find the right trick, the right book or the right guru, go to the right retreat, hear the right sermon, instantly we will be transformed into a new person at a new level of spirituality and wholeness...'It is the quest for the short cut which brings insight.' "

"A few years ago, I had a little boy. Then, within a year, he became a man. He went through one of those adolescent growth spurts. He grew almost a foot in height, his voice dropped into a deep bass, he began to shave, his body filled out--he was a different person. The same thing happens in our spiritual life. For a while we may live on a plateu of life and relationship with God. Then one of those moments comes in which we experience a growth spurt and find ourselves on a new level of life and relationship with God. We experience God in a new and different way. We see ourselves and life in a new perspective. Old things pass away, and new things take their place. But if we mistake such a growth spurt for all there is in spirituality, then we are not prepared for the long haul toward spiritual wholeness. We will tend to languish as we wait for another spurt to come along. Or we will try to reproduce the setting in which the previous spurt took place, hoping to create another such experience." --M. Robert Mulholland, Jr., Invitation to a Journey

The dark night of the soul; the waiting and hoping and despairing through long, cold desert nights, doing nothing, is not the absense of life and growth. It is an essential leg of the journey. It is the mile upon mile of plodding in silence and watching the backpack in front of you that must proceed the ecstasy of climbing mountains.