"...ecstasy- the experience of ‘rising up with wings as eagles.’ Here is an utterly authentic way for the life of God to come into our lives, and the experience of such moments of exuberance and abandon and celebration has always been a part of biblical religion. There is a hint from the very beginning that this is part of the nature of God himself. Do you recall how one of the Genesis accounts depicts God as looking out over all he had been creating and finding it ‘very good’? He promptly proceeded to take a day off simply to celebrate the wonder of ‘isness’. This is ecstasy. ...[And so] to lose one’s self in wonder, awe, and praise, to forget one’s self before the mystery of God- I would have defined that as the highest spiritual achievement."
      John Claypool (The Light Within You)

"This is ecstasy. To be caught up out of one’s self in joy over some reality is exactly the sort of experience God wants each one of us to have, for remember we are made in his image, and [this]...is our true destiny. Right here is where the creativity of life is to be found- when we let ‘the child within us’ out to play and to leap and to celebrate."
      John Claypool (The Light Within You)

"Several years ago I came across the phrase, ‘the mystery that is every man.’ From the moment I saw it I liked it, because it reminds me of a fact about every person who has ever lived- that everyone is a dynamic, mysterious reality..."
      John Claypool (The Light Within You)

John Claypool and ecstasy quotes from THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas