There is a great joy—a light within—when reading a book like Circle of Quiet. Soul speaks to soul and there is a current of understanding—someone has put into words all that you have thought to be true without ever giving it more than a hazy translation in your mind. What a good thing, to see your desires, your joys, revealed to you—to discover what it is that makes life well up inside you and signal “this is the direction of truth.” After all, that’s all we have time for, following after truth. There’s no sense in bothering with untruths; they’re unsatisfying and they fall apart in the end. Sincerity is a quality that I am quick to desire in my relationships—my friendships and my first encounters with passing strangers. Sincerity, I think, is in the business of earthing out the real—and that is the aim, to throw off the detritus of unreality, of all that is nonessential, and strike to the core of being. That’s what we are called to do, when we are charged with making life “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” In Heaven, all beings—all souls—exist perfectly as they are, and each is revealed fully to each, but without an encumbering self-consciousness, since everything is communion, corporality, unity. The core of our beings is love, and anything that interferes with love must be stripped away.