Your ordinary encounter with God happens right where you are—within your thoughts, words, and actions. It's there that you meet Jesus daily, and in those moments, you can become another Christ, Christ himself (alter Christus, ipse Christus).
The new life we received at Baptism is destined to be built up until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. (Eph 4:13.) The divine element, the supernatural one, is decisive in personal holiness, and it unites and harmonizes all the human facets. But we should not forget that included here, as an intrinsic and necessary element, is the human one: “If we accept the responsibility of being children of God, we will realize that God wants us to be very human. Our heads should indeed be touching heaven, but our feet should be firmly on the ground. The price of living as Christians is not that of ceasing to be human or of abandoning the effort to acquire those virtues which some have even without knowing Christ. The price paid for each Christian is the redeeming Blood of our Lord and he wants us to be both very human and very divine, struggling each day to imitate him who is perfectus Deus, perfectus homo ( perfect God, perfect man)".
Through our prayer we hope to come to see the created world, here and now, as God sees it. With his help, we grasp what is happening around us with a “simple intuition” that stems from love. This is the greatest fruit of prayer, and transforms our entire life. Prayer doesn’t just help us to change certain attitudes or overcome our defects. Christian prayer is directed, above all, to uniting ourselves with God, and thus to gradually learning to look at the world in the way He does, beginning already here on earth. God wants to heal our vision, our way of looking at the world and the people around us, with his own light. The loving relationship with God that we attain through Jesus is not simply something that we do, but rather it changes who we are.
By developing with God’s help this supernatural “way of looking,” we learn to uncover the good hidden in every created reality, even where it seems to be absent. For nothing escapes God’s loving plan, which is always stronger than any evil. And thus we learn to value the freedom of others in a new way, to let go of the temptation to decide for them, as though the destiny of everything depended on our own actions. We also come to understand better that God’s action has its own ways and times, which we neither should nor can control. Contemplative prayer helps us to not become obsessed with wanting to solve every problem immediately, and to discover more readily the light present in everything that happens around us, also in the wounds and weaknesses of our world.
