Quotes about Presence

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.

That divine presence explains the joy the Jews felt so passionately when they went to their temple and which we find expressed in their Psalms. If we don't have as much joy in our churches as they had, it can only be because we don't have as much faith and love toward that divine presence as they had. And yet we have the presence of the same God in an even more complete and more concrete form in Christ, who is God incarnate, fully divine and fully human.

Love works; and if we do not see the works of love (in places where they obviously ought to be) then we can be sure that love is not present.

The next time you feel forsaken and lift up your voice to pray to Almighty God, do this—go to a private place and spend significant time reflecting on the incredible truth that the One who hears your prayers has been there too.

Do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go. JOSHUA 1:9

That's the way it is with our Father in Heaven. When you became a son or a daughter, when you were adopted into His family, He opened up for you through His Son's death on the cross a way of fellowship and relationship that makes it possible for you to bypass the temple and its animal sacrifices. You don't have to talk to God through a priest. You can go right into the presence of God Almighty and He will hear you.