Pathless,
Thanks for your encouragement to "indulge".........
"True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth.The kind of communication that is necessary at this level must also be 'communion'................It is wordless, it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are"
(From a speech given in Calcutta, 1968)
"But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of EVERYTHING, including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life: and simply burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems.........and not in 'contemplation' with a big C, or in asceticism or in anything like that...........Certainly not in books. I can go on writing them, for all that, but one might as well make paper airplanes out of the whole lot"
(From a letter written in 1958)
And speaking of God's grace......and Zen......in a letter to D T Suzuki in 1959......
"The realization, the finding of ourselves in Christ and therefore in paradise, has a special character from the fact that this is all a free gift from God. With us, this stress is on freedom. God's freedom, the indeterminateness of salvation, is the thing that corresponds to Zen in Chritianity. The breakthrough that comes with the realization of what the finger of a koan is pointing to is like the breakthrough of the realization that a sacrament, for instance, is a finger pointing to the completely spontaneous Gift of Himself to us on the part of God - beyond and above images, outside of every idea, every law, every right and wrong, everything high and low, everything spiritual or material. Whether we are good or bad, wise or foolish, there is always this sudden irruption, this breakthrough of God's freedom into our life, turning the whole thing upside down so that it comes out, contrary to all expectation, right side up. This is grace, this is salvation, this is Christianity. And, so far as I can see, it is also very much like Zen..................."
Well, enough for now.