Practicing the Presence of God

(Found here)

“The thought of God is not one which can satisfactorily occupy the central focus of the mind. When we try to think about him, our intellect beats about the bush, takes refuge in inferences and analogies; the thought itself escapes us. Insofar as we try to make God the direct object of our attention we are always, aren’t we, in reality trying to substitute an inferior image in place of him. We think of him as a King, but he doesn’t really wear a gold crown; we think of him as up in the air, but he isn’t really up in the air more than anywhere else. Being alive to God means something a little more complicated; it means that the thought of God is at the very apex of our unconscious minds all the time, overflowing all the time into our conscious thoughts, our conscious acts. It is like a taste in the mouth, a perfume in the nostrils, that conditions for the time being the whole of your experience, without your noticing that it is there. Not God in the very center of the picture; that is not possible in this life, even for the Saints; but God only just out of the very center of the picture so that he dominates the grouping of the whole. Alive to God, every thought of yours haunted—let us not be afraid to use that word for it—haunted by the Divine Presence.”

~Ronald Knox