Infinite Depth

The truly sacred attitude toward life... does not recoil from our own inner
emptiness, but rather penetrates into it with awe and reverence, and with
the awareness of mystery.
This is a most important discovery in the interior life. For the external
self fears and recoils from what is beyond it, and above it. It dreads the
emptiness and darkness of the interior self... The whole tragedy of
'diversion' is precisely that it is a flight from all that is most real and
immediate and genuine in ourselves. It is a flight from life and from
experience -- an attempt to put a veil of objects between the mind and its
experience of itself. It is therefore a matter of great courage and
spiritual energy to turn away from diversion and prepare to meet face to
face, that immediate experience of life which is intolerable to the
exterior man. This is only possible when we are able to see our inner
selves not as a vacuum but as an infinite depth, not as emptiness but
fullness. This change of perspective is impossible as long as we are afraid
of our own nothingness, as long as we are afraid of fear, afraid of
poverty, afraid of boredom -- as long as we run away from ourselves.

Thomas Merton