Each Moment God Keeps Us In Existence
by Rev. Fr. M. Raymond O.C.S.O.

That fact, faced fully for perhaps the first time, most likely frightens you. But that fright is perfectly normal. Yet if this fear persists and does not quickly become wonder, gratitude, and adoration, it is basic positive proof that you have never understood the most fundamental truths of the faith. It proves more. It proves that you have been taken in by the world; that you have but been using a set of values that is false and scales that are anything but up to standard. It proves that you have not been living fully no matter how alive you have thought yourself to be.

 

For God is one, and God is life. Therefore, life is a unity. But what have you been making of it? Have you not divorced time and eternity? Have you not separated the natural from the supernatural? Have you not partitioned off your religion from your work, your play, your social contacts, your business world, your weekday existence? What place has God held in your life from morning to night, from Sunday to Saturday, from year to year? Have you given so much as first place to Him who wants the only place?

 

Prepare yourself at once to give a real assent to the truth that first place in your life is not enough for the God who made you! He has not loved you with an everlasting love just to have the first place in your life, ahead of many other loves and countless other interests. He does not now exert His omnipotence, nor every day from dawn to dusk then on through the night, ply His providence just to have first place in your life. He would never shatter nothingness with His creative cry of "Fiat" just for first place. He merits and He wants the only place!

 

That does not mean that you are not to have other loves and other interests. Far from it. Once you have given God the only place in your life, then your loves are multiplied and your interests become innumerable; for you live fully, and the almost limitless capacity of your heart for loves and of your mind for interests, in God and under God and for God, will be receiving its fill. But before that tide begins to swell, you will have to make your life the unity God planned for it. You will have to integrate your whole day and your entire existence. You will have to blend into perfect harmony, the many elements that make up your living. Since you are what your thoughts are, your first task is to realise, that while you can legitimately talk of "this world" and "the other world", your Heaven actually begins on Earth or it does not begin at all. The same drive and dynamism must be present in your conviction that while there is a real distinction between time and eternity, your eternity has already begun in time - all of which means that you are not only living face to face with God, but that you are actually living in God and God is actually living in you!

 

Taken from You, pp. 29-30.