Godthings

“[Mystics] do not of course need to be religious in the conventional sense (abiding, that is, by established tenets); many of them are not. For those who are, however, there is this difference: the nonreligious mystic generally has nothing to ‘work with’ but intuition in the attempt to move nearer to creator, or mystical center, however one may define this core. While the religious person, a member of this or that church, this or that order, has a liturgy, a rule, an exact and exacting prescription of how to live, and what to do, and what not to do, in order to evolve a closeness—to earn a closeness—to God.”

— Mary Oliver, “The Poem as Prayer, the Prayer as Ornament: Gerard Manley Hopkins,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems