Quotes about Presence

This "ground," this "world" where I am mysteriously present at once to my own self and to the freedoms of all other men, is not a visible, objective and determined structure with fixed laws and demands. It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door.

Think how your life would be changed if you passionately longed for and lived every day as if this would be the moment Jesus would return!

Might we consider boredom as not only necessary for our life but also as one of its greatest blessings? A gift, pure and simple, a precious chance to be alone with our thoughts and alone with God?

I had begun to comprehend that the Bible's story is about the relationship of God to human beings, and of human beings to one another, and that this meant that it is our friendships, marriages, families, and even church congregations that best reveal what kind of theology we have, who our God is. Or, as Thomas Merton once put it, "because we love, God is present." That is the story.

Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous attention to detail in the book Leviticus, involving God in the minutiae of daily life—all the cooking and cleaning of a people's domestic life—might be revisioned as the very love of God. A God who cares so much as to desire to be present in everything we do.

It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

One thing we hear from churchless and churched people alike is that they intensely desire the local church to provide what no other group can offer: an experience of the presence of God.

Half of all regular church-going adults admit that they have not experienced God's presence at any time during the past year. The younger the adult, the more likely they are to state that God is a distant, impersonal reality for them. And even among those who say God's presence was evident to them, most of them say that happened only one or two times throughout the course of the year.

O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence.

O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude...

Affection is like the noonday sun; it does not need the presence of another to be manifest.