The Creator deals directly with the creature

Here's a a quote from an article by Michael J Buckley SJ, from The Way, 1975 - The Structure of the Rules for the Duscernment of Spirits. I've just started reading it myself, but I really liked this part, so .....

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[...] A fundamental conviction founds and supports the history of religious consciousness and commitment: God himself will direct a man's life. Within this religious context, God emerges more personally than the ultimate source of meaning, being, and value, more engaged even than what stands primary in any process and that towards which things ineluctably move, more immediate than an explanation for the existence of contingencies or a presupposition for the imperatives of the ethical enterprise or an horizon within which beauty and spirit are gathered and made available to men.

All of this tile religious man may sense or intuit or accept, but none of these constitute his focus or his motive. He longs for God, not as men think about marriage, but as they search for a wife. He knows God, not so much in awareness that the cosmos is rooted in a source, but in the contemplative experience of his longing - God is apprehended as the correlative object of his desires. It is not so much rigour in thought or morality in living that is intended; it is experience and possession and a union comprising the compenetration of persons and ecstatic transcendence of presence. Within the religious context, God is not so classically 'He' (or 'She'), as 'Thou'; just as in religion, a man stands not as another fact within the universe, but as someone called by name out of nothingness and to whom a word is spoken.

A process becomes predominantly religious - rather than metaphysical or ethical or aesthetic - when the man so named turns to claim or to be claimed by the 'Thou' about which studies may speak as the Absolute, but which none of them can control or deliver. Religion differs from the academic as its engagements are particular, its modalities are interpersonal, and its aim is transforming union. The religious man is vitally persuaded not only that God has offered himself as such a possibility and fulfilment, but that he will guide human life towards this realization; God offers not only finality, but consistent direction.

So the pressing question lies not about general purpose or willing providence, but about concrete means; how does God direct human life to himself? What are the means of contacting or of being guided by God? Where does one locate this directing power of God? To this question three variant and complex answers historically have been given .......

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