Recently, I told someone that, since a particular major event had happened, I was able to read only C. S. Lewis. He asked if that gave me comfort. I realised that we were on very different pages. I'm not after comfort. I'm after clarity.
In the earlier part of the week, I had a lot of time to think, so I immersed myself in spiritual reading and listening and in prayer and meditation, because what I would have been thinking otherwise would have been negative, unconstructive, fevered, gloomy, and out of touch with reality.
People think that conscious contact with God should be comfortable. It is not. It reveals the inadequacy of the person, the horror of the ego's constructs, the fallacy of one's whole basis for life, one's vanity and hubris, the futility of the material world taken in itself. It might also provide positive feelings of relief, connection, purpose, satisfaction, and so on, but comfort, itself, is elusive and transitory. It is the goal of the addict, not the person trying to grow spiritually.
What's comfort? The numbness of being so busy and so wrapped up in the details of the world one is continually shunted between the non-feelings of excitement, depression, and anxiety, which are hormonal or neurobiological states rather than actual feelings. It's possible to go through life feeling absolutely nothing at all but convinced one is living a full, big life because of the secretions of glands and the minestrone soup of neurotransmitters.