Isaac Newton said: “I can take up my telescope and look millions of kilometres into the space, but also I can isolate myself in my room and be closer to the God of heaven with prayer than with all the telescopes of earth”. Prayer and meditation bring heaven down to earth or, better, through them we get closer to God.

The providential presence of God is found in all creation and he who searches always finds Him in everything, because He is in all that He has created. And so, everything we encounter here on earth should illumine our internal vision so as to perceive them. When the created doesn’t lead us to the Creator himself, rather it keeps us to itself, whether persons or things, it becomes an idol that entraps our senses and imprisons our interior until we become its prisoners by what is perishable or insignificant.

Carnal love, as in the days of Claret, is one of the enslaving idolatries whose tentacles are extended today even among priests and religious; there are recent sad histories. The love of money is another uncontrollable idol that makes even the most sublime human relations be converted into cold commerce. The more confined and imprisoned the human spirit is, the more it experiments in its interior the desire for transcendence and liberty. Today we see many of these signs.

Detachment is the mantra that one has to follow in what refers to created things, as only God merits our unconditional adhesion. And it is only like this that we can have something to tell the world today. Today people expect to see in the believers an authentic experience of God, and if they don’t see it in them, they search for it elsewhere. Priests, religious and lay people must be persons of prayer, with experience in the way of God, with all our thought and life centred in Him. You and I, we have inherited a rich spirituality of contemplation in action. Do we cultivate it?