Daily Inspiration Quote by Johannes Tauler

Tauler’s line is a quiet demolition of spiritual hierarchy. In a medieval world that often treated holiness like a scarce commodity - rationed out through status, education, or proximity to the Church - he insists on a radical baseline: God acts toward everyone with the same urgency. The sting arrives in the pivot. If grace isn’t unequal, then the disparity we observe in devotion, peace, or “saintliness” can’t be blamed on divine favoritism. The problem shifts from heaven’s supply to the human receiver.

That receiver-language is doing heavy work. “Touches,” “warns,” and “gifts” sketch a full spectrum of divine engagement: tenderness, interruption, generosity. Tauler implies that people aren’t simply obedient or disobedient; they are differently permeable. Some are defended by pride, distraction, fear, or the need to control outcomes. Others are porous enough to be changed. The subtext is pastoral and slightly unsparing: your spiritual life is not a report card on God’s attention, it’s a mirror of your availability.

Context matters. As a Dominican mystic shaped by the Rhineland spiritual tradition, Tauler is speaking into an anxious religious culture obsessed with signs of election and the mechanics of merit. His move is to relocate certainty away from external proof and toward interior transformation. It’s also politically subtle: if God “wants one quite as much as another,” then spiritual authority can’t be hoarded. The quote reads like an argument for humility that doubles as an argument for dignity - not because everyone is already equal in attainment, but because everyone is equally addressed.