If we knew how to listen to God, we would hear him speaking to us. For God does speak. He speaks in his Gospels. He also speaks through life – that new gospel to which we ourselves add a page each day. But we are rarely open to God’s message, because our faith is too weak and our life too earthbound . . . To have faith is not only to raise one’s eyes to God to contemplate him; it is also to look at this world, with Christ’s eyes. If we had allowed Christ to penetrate our whole being, if we had purified ourselves, the world would no longer be an obstacle. It would be a perpetual incentive to work for the Father in order that, in Christ, his kingdom might come on earth as it is in heaven. We must pray to have sufficient faith to know how to look at life . . . Grant that I may be big enough to reach the world, strong enough to carry it, pure enough to embrace it without wanting to keep it. Grant that I may be a meeting-place, but a temporary one, a road that does not end in itself, because everything to be gathered there, everything human, leads toward You.

– Father Michel Quoist