The Loss of Ourselves is the Possession of God

There is truth in the saying which is found in experimental writers, that the loss of ourselves is the possession of God. The sad experience in our state of sin, that faith in the created and the finite has no adequate foundation, leads us back, or rather is the occasion, through the grace of God, of our being led back to him, who is the only proper object of faith. When the vessel of our own making sinks, when the frail plank to which we had clung passes from under us, it is then, and not till then, that we seize the strong hand of him who walks upon the winds and waves. We sink that we may rise; we suffer that we may be healed again; we die that we may live.

— from A Treatise on Divine Union (1851) Part 5, Chapter 7.