Quotes about Presence

your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House that hides the Sacramental Christ!

There is only now.

In Silence, God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.

In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with his mind and lips, but in a certain sense with his whole being.

By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence.

We have found Him, He has found us. We are in Him, He is in us. There is nothing further to look for except for the deepening of this life we already possess. Be content.

We must slow down to a human tempo and we'll begin to have time to listen.

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.