Brent Curtis and John Eldridge, in The Divine Romance, refer to "relational intimacy" with God, a point of accepting God as a wild lover. This allows us to release our trust in the "lovers" that did not satisfy our deepest needs. The past, insufficient "lovers" include all attachments of persons and things. In releasing these, we open to accept Spirit as our wild, satisfying Lover, or Beloved.

Curtis and Eldridge speak of finding our past religious activities no longer to satisfy or benefit us: "There comes a place on our spiritual journey where renewed religious activity is of no use whatsoever." Of this point, they say, "we are both drawn to and fear it."

C. S. Lewis wrote, in The Weight of Glory: "We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

Curtis and Eldridge point to the opportunity that awaits us when past "lovers" no longer satisfy us. When our "materialistic" or "spiritual" friends or religious leaders might seek to lead us to renew a past commitment, the Spirit of Christ might be seeking to wean us off the very satisfactions that once were satisfying but are no longer intended to satisfy. They write for a Christian audience, but this applies to us all:

At some point on our Christian journey, we all stand at the edge of those geographies where our heart has been satisfied by less-wild lovers, whether they be those of competence and order or those of indulgence. If we listen to our heart again, perhaps for the first time in a while, it tells us how weary it is of the familiar and the indulgent.

As we are prepared for this new experience of Life, we might find all methods of prayer no longer to work for us. This can be a summons to abandon techniques of prayer and meditation, to rest in the Heart of the Beloved, which is, in some way, totally not our heart and totally our heart. For in this wildly free Love, we are gathered One, in Grace and by Grace.

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