For a child, time as the great circus parade of past, present, and future, cause and effect, has scarcely started yet and means little because for a child all time is by and large NOW time and apparently endless. What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think much that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless? It is by content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity — happy and sad times.
The experience of ecstatic oneness with the Divine comes in many forms: quiet contentment, a sense of gentle rapture, a mystical feeling of universal harmony, all-consuming passion, flights of spiritual abandon, and ferocious joy. But the most powerful experience of ecstasy is a combination of these feelings, when, in one unforgettable moment, we touch the hidden God – the terrible and wonderful Mystery that has given birth to all things and that makes them glow and dance with Its life force. In those moments we may see what It sees and feel at least an infinitesimal part of what It feels.