Beginning to Pray Part III

"Theophon the Recluse says, 'Most people are like a shaving of wood which is curled round its central emptiness.' If we are really honest, we must admit that this is a very apt description of the state of practically all of us.
Then we must be able to fight this anguish and to say, 'No, I will stick it through, and I will come to the point where the anguish itself will prompt me to do what good will is incapable of doing.' Indeed, a moment comes, a moment of despair and anguish and terror, which makes us turn even deeper inward and cry, 'Lord, have mercy! I am perishing. Lord, save me!' We discover that there is nothing in us that can give us life, or rather is life; that all we called life, imagined life to be, was outside and inside there was nothing.
Then we look into the abyss of nonentity and we feel that the deeper we go into it the less there will be left of us. This is a dangerous moment, this is the moment we must hesitate.
At this point we have reached the first layer of depth where we begin to be able to knock at a door. For on the layer where we were just resting from our neighbour before we felt bored, on the layer where we are simply bored and feel offended that we should be, on the layer on which we begin to fidget and worry, then feel slightly anguished, we have as yet no reason to cry and shout with a despair that fills all our mind, all our heart, all our will and all our body with a sense that unless God comes I am lost, there is no hope, because I know that if I emerge out of this depth I will simply be back in the realm of delusion, of reflected life, but not real life.