Daily Reading for April 24

The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man’s life; and until he has realized it he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers. It is therefore the function of practical mysticism to increase, not diminish, the total efficiency, the wisdom and steadfastness, of those who try to practice it. It will help them to enter, more completely than ever before, into the life of the group to which they belong. It will teach them to see the world in a truer proportion, discerning eternal beauty beyond and beneath apparent ruthlessness. It will educate them in a charity free from all taint of sentimentalism; it will confer on them an unconquerable hope; and assure them that still, in the hour of greatest desolation, “There lives the dearest freshness of deep down things.”

From Practical Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill, quoted in Wisdom of the Cloister: A Monastic Reader, edited by John Skinner (Image Books, 1999).