All that God asks you most pressingly is to go out of yourself, and let God be God in you. God is a God of the present, which takes you and receives you as you are found now. Not as you have been, but as you are now. You should know that God must ask and pour fully into the moment you are found ready.
We should be able to recognize true and perfect love by whether someone has great hope and confidence in God. For there is nothing that testifies more clearly to perfect love than trust.
Though it may be called nescience and unknowing, yet there is in it, more all-knowing and understanding than without it. For this unknowing lures and attracts you from all understood things, and from yourself as well.
The lack of peace that you feel can only come from your own self-will, whether you are aware of you or not. Start with yourself therefore, and take leave of yourself. Truly, if you do not depart from yourself, then wherever you take refuge, you will find obstacles and unrest; wherever it may be.
Those who seek peace in external things — whether in places or devotional practices, people or works, in withdrawal from the world, or poverty, or self-abasement — however great these things may be, or whatever their character, they are still nothing at all, and cannot be the source of peace. Those who seek in this way seek wrongly, and the farther they range, the less they find what they are looking for. They proceed like someone who has lost their way. The farther they go, the more lost they become.
But what, then, should they do? First of all, they should renounce themselves. And then they will have renounced all things. Truly, if someone were to renounce a kingdom, or the whole world, while still holding on to themselves, then they would have renounced nothing at all. And indeed, if someone renounces themselves, then whatever they might keep, whether it be a kingdom or honor or whatever it may be, they will still have renounced all these things.
Treat all things as if they were loaned to you without any ownership — whether body or soul, sense or strength, external goods or honors, house or hall, everything. Only those for whom God is present in all things, and who make the very best use of their reason, know what true peace is. And truly possess heaven.