Sannyasa means not an escape, but when person begins to feel that the whole world is his home - the small drops off, as the bigger comes in.

Nirmalananda Swami

(from "Swami Nirmalananda - His life and teachings"):

Question: If all this is God, what is there to be renounced?

Nirmalananda Swami: You do not seem to understand what renunciation really means. It is not a deliberate giving up, as people think. It is a corollary to taking up something else. In the act of your taking up or accepting a thing, a less valuable thing is naturally passed over. There are currency notes of various denominations, say a ten-rupee note, a hundred-rupee note and a thousand-rupee note and you are allowed to take any one of them. Knowing their value, you take the thousand-rupees notes and you renounce the other two.

A Sannyasin does, just in the same way, select what he knows to be more valuable. In place of the old feeling that he has a house, a mother, a father etc., he begins to feel that the whole world is his home, that all men are fathers and all women mothers to him. The small drops off, as the bigger comes in. Your question is, "if all this is God, what is there to be renounced?" If you do really see and feel all this as God, you have nothing to renounce. But with most of us, it is only in theory, in practice, nothing of this is God to us. By means of observation and experiment you should arrive at the truth, see it actually before you. Then you will feel no differentiation, no high or low, no giving up or accepting. Until then, to say that all this is God is mere vain talk.