Beneath all our achievements, plans, travels, and conquests we have but life. When we drink water, when we silently watch children play, when we walk in the cold and feel cold, we are in life, one with it and hence one with God. And so no matter what we have it is always enough, for nothing is enough. No matter where we are we are no-where. No matter who we become we are nobody. For in the ground of our being we live Christ’s life. In the foundations of the heart, God is present in our simple presence to life.

The stirring of leaves in the wind makes the wind visible. Their stirring is the wind’s stirring, their whisper is the wind’s whisper. And so with love. Our actions of love make the invisible visible. Our actions of love make love present to ourselves and to others. And as we go out of ourselves in love, and become, as it were, lost in those we love, we discover a self-greater than our isolated ego. We discover the birth of that self born of the death to self-centeredness.

The love we speak of unites us not only with God but to our brothers and sisters as well. Indeed, the incarnation of Jesus teaches us that we must search for God’s love in human flesh and weakness.

For religious man, life is essentially a journey in which one sets out to quench a thirst, not simply to know that a God exists but to drink directly from God’s own life to which man is bonded (re-ligio) in the depths of his being. Religion is thus the intuitively known and symbolically expressed desire to become who we are in God. The fulfilling of this desire is the realization of the true self.

God is He Who Is and his world is the world that is. What are extraordinary are the ordinary, concrete realities of daily life. And it is our desire to be extraordinary that, in fact, makes us less than ordinary whenever such desires move us to pull away from, reject or even just ignore God manifesting himself to us in the next hot August afternoon or the cold wind of a winter evening.