...sought to touch Jesus

Affirmation, testimony, praise of the Lord.  In this supreme state of reverence we shed our limitations; in this frame of mind we can arrive at complete honesty and absolute clarity of vision.  It is not a thing that comes easily — it needs much practice.  But it is the only state in which a person is receptive to divine grace and it cannot be attained without considerable personal effort.  We can only comprehend the great realities we are meant to comprehend by making a supreme effort....

Instead of dreaming a person must be wide awake to prepare the way for progress in an active and upward direction.  For this a receptive and selfless state of mind is necessary — a state in which precisely because it is selfless he finds a greater personal freedom than he had ever imagined possible.  The attitude can best be summed up as one of obedient receptivity, selfless service, exultant gratitude.  Personal limitations are shed like worn out garments and with them the anxiety that accompanies them.  The world and its affairs are viewed with a new and far more penetrating insight.  A long road must be traveled before one arrives at uninhibited contact with God, but it is the road — and the only road — to one's own fulfillment.

What one must recognize is that the whole process is entirely a personal one, can only be worked out in one's individual existence, cannot be measured by outward events at all even though the trials one meets every day play their part in opening one's eyes to the connection and significance of the happenings of life.  To aspire to a higher state is an inborn attribute of human nature.  The person who is completely satisfied with things as they are and has no desire to rise above his limitations can only be described as spiritually mediocre, self-centered, obtuse, pompous, and narrow-minded.

So for all the humility of self-surrender we must still try to rise above ourselves — we must still have ambition.  But a very different kind of ambition — not the usual arrogant, self-seeking kind....

In order to become more of a human he finds he has to be a human and so he is back at his starting point.  Unless a person reaches out, letting his imagination soar, striving toward a high ideal, the only alternative is to vegetate — and a person who vegetates ends by becoming less than human.  This is the psychological explanation of the great human tragedy through which we are passing today.