God gave me being so that I might give it back to him. It is like one of those tests that resemble traps, found in fairy tales and initiation stories. If I accept this gift, it is bad and fatal; its virtue appears through refusal. God allows me to exist outside of him. It is for me to refuse this permission. Humility is the refusal to exist outside of God. Queen of virtues. The self is only the shadow projected by sin and error that arrest the light of God, and that I take for a being. Even if one could be like God, it would be better to be mud that obeys God. What a pencil is for me when, with eyes closed, I feel the table with its point—to be that for Christ. We have the possibility of being mediators between God and the part of creation entrusted to us. Our consent is needed so that through us he may perceive his own creation. With our consent he performs this marvel. It would suffice that I had known how to withdraw from my own soul for this table before me to have the incomparable good fortune of being seen by God. God can love in us only this consent to withdraw in order to let him pass, just as he himself, as Creator, withdrew in order to let us be. This double operation has no other meaning than love, like the father who gives his child something with which the child can make a present on the father's birthday. God, who is nothing other than love, has created nothing other than love. All the things I see, hear, breathe, touch, eat, all the beings I encounter—I deprive all of this of contact with God, and I deprive God of contact with all of this, to the extent that something in me says I. I can do something for all of this and for God, namely withdraw, respect the intimate encounter. The strict fulfillment of simply human duty is a condition for my being able to withdraw. It gradually wears away the ropes that hold me in place and prevent me. I cannot conceive the necessity that God should love me, when I feel so clearly that even among human beings affection for me can only be a mistake. But I can easily picture him loving this perspective of creation that can only be had from the point where I am. But I stand in the way. I must withdraw so that he may see it. I must withdraw so that God may come into contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves. My presence is indiscreet, as though I found myself between two lovers or two friends. I am not the young girl awaiting a bridegroom, but the unwanted third who is with two betrothed and must go away so that they may truly be together. If only I knew how to disappear, there would be a perfect union of love between God and the earth I walk on, the sea I hear... What does it matter what energy, what gifts I have, and so on? I always have enough of them to disappear.
"And death, ravishing the light from my eyes, restores to the day they soiled all its purity..."
Let me disappear so that these things I see may become, by virtue of no longer being things that I see, perfectly beautiful. I do not in the least desire that this created world should no longer be perceptible to me, but that it should no longer be to me that it is perceptible. To me, it cannot tell its secret, which is too high. Let me depart, and the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets. To see a landscape as it is when I am not there... When I am somewhere, I sully the silence of heaven and earth with my breathing and the beating of my heart.