To speak about absorption does not mean a sensible state that a soul enjoys in certain type of prayer without distractions.
Even absorption is not a natural self-concentration produced by activities that require of attention, or of more or less intense concentration on daily duties.
Contemplation does not detach you from contingencies of life.
Material things are not evil, but your type of relation with them may be evil. Evil is eagerness and desire, which settle life on a material level.
Renunciation leads naturally to contemplation. One cannot define Renunciation itself. There is void between perfect state and ascetic state, and a continuous Renunciation of the soul should fill this void.
In the beginning of his path, the soul is too much busy with his troubles and sorrows, and that is why worldly evils are to him just a mere consideration to which he sticks by attachment or sympathy.
“My soul is tied to all souls forever. Just as God is a prisoner in the Creation, so my soul is a prisoner of its love to all souls. These souls are my life; and I am these souls.
Certain souls complain sometimes and say they cannot meditate because their exercise is heavy and they get bored, and ask of their Superior a lighter routine of spiritual discipline. Superiors also observe how methods of meditation do not result according to their expectation in all cases; they do not see an evident advance in prayer and there is an apparent stagnation.
A prayer cannot be complete and total if our whole being is not devoted to it. When we say “whole being”, this does not mean an intense sensible flight, but a being as a whole.
Your prayer cannot be full when contains remnants of self-interest. However spiritual this egotism be, it cannot be an expansive universal feeling.
A man can go beyond his little miseries only through renunciation to his own miseries.
Generally, in relation to Theology, people think at once about church or religion, and more often than not you hear commentaries that, as the obvious result of ignorance, surround this word or its meaning with certain remote and dark halo, as if it was detached from human life, and an exclusive redoubt of a group of beings –“theologians”– whose activities appear before men as something almost incomprehensible.