The Cloud of Glory. We want to see God. But we are unable to apprehend the LORD God in all his glory. So at the great moments of biblical history, he appears in the hidden form of a Cloud.

If we are ignorant of our soul’s powers, we will misinterpret spiritual instruction. We will misinterpret Contemplative Prayer.Genuine goodness is a matter of habitually acting and responding appropriately in each situation as it arises, moved always by the desire to please God,” the father writes. Other norms he notes are the general good use of time and the regard for communal prayer: “The true contemplative has the highest esteem for the liturgy and is careful and exact in celebrating it, in continuity with the tradition of our Fathers.” These fruits of contemplation can be readily perceived and might therefore reassure some, looking in from the outside, as to the value of contemplative prayer—but probably not many. Moreover, they do not touch the more significant meaning and value of contemplative practice for the human community. There is a bonding, transcending time and place, with Jesus, “creator and dispenser of time,” which enables the contemplative to “share all Jesus has and enter the fellowship of those who love Him,” including “the communion of the blessed.” Each member “must do his share however slight to strengthen the fellowship as it strengthens him.” That all writing and feeling of a man’s own being must needs be lost if the perfection of this work shall verily be felt in any soul in this life

Of some certain tokens by the which a man may prove whether he be called of God to work in this work In our own lives, we should not strain our imaginations to force a similar vision within ourselves.How these young presumptuous disciples misunderstand this other word up; and of the deceits that follow thereon The Cloud's de-emphasis on the activity of the intelligence represents a seemingly archetypal impulse hinted at even in Platonic texts: that the ultimate reality which the mystic seeks to experience is finally beyond the grasp of the intellect (Louth, p. 13). On the other hand, it seems that since in Platonism there is a kinship ( syngeneia) between the soul and the Ideas, the search for knowledge of the forms is a homecoming, the return of the soul to its proper nature. Such an ontological bond does seem to result in a significant continuity between the initial and later stages of Platonic contemplation. Platonism conceived the contemplative ascent as a process that required successive purifications until the soul regained its pristine condition, although the final vision of the supreme Forms of the Good and the Beautiful is outside the soul's capacity and is simply given or revealed (Lees, p. 271; Louth, pp. 2-13).