Quotes about Presence

The best way to prepare for the coming of Christ is never to forget the presence of Christ.

Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.

We can regard ourselves as already awake; we can regard our world as already sacred.

The only way God can strengthen his presence in our will is to weaken his presence in our feelings. Otherwise we would become spiritual cripples, unable to walk without emotional crutches. This is why he gives us dryness, sufferings, and failures.

Prayer is not only conversation, it is transformation. It is not only light, it is fire. And the closer you get to Him, the hotter the fire gets. Words begin to melt. The first word that melts in His presence is the word 'I.' That is His unique name. The closer you get to Him, the harder it is to begin a sentence with 'I.' It melts in the fire of 'thou.

The person who is committing the sin of sloth may be doing nothing visible that is wrong. Yet he is rejecting the presence of God, refusing the joy of love.

Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part to idols, to the many false gods that now bite away at our lives.

Why Won't We Be Bored in Heaven? Because we are with God, and God is infinite. We never come to the end of exploring Him. He is new every day. Because we are with God, and God is eternal. Time does not pass (a condition for boredom); it just is. All time is present in eternity, as all the events of the plot are present in an author's mind. There is no waiting. Because we are with God, and God is love. Even on earth, the only people who are never bored are lovers.

The practice of the presence of God, though we begin it at special times of prayer, is designed to spill out and over and into all times.

He came. That is the salient fact, the towering truth, that alone keeps us from putting a bullet through our heads. He came.

Christ deliberately hides Himself, disguises Himself, gives no physical sign of His Real Presence in the Eucharist, for a crucially important purpose: to test and elicit and strengthen our faith. If we saw miraculous signs in every Eucharist, or if the Eucharistic bread and wine had no taste, like other bread and wine, or even if we felt unique feelings each time we received the Eucharist, our faith would be less strong because it would have sensible or emotional crutches to lean on.

Since (1) charity is supernatural, and comes only from the real presence of God in the soul (St. Thomas' paragraph 3), and since (2) all men, and not only Christians, are capable of charity (as has been proved in the paragraph above), it follows that (3) all men are capable of accepting the real presence of God in their souls, even if they have defective or mistaken concepts of God.