"God seems to nourish us at each of these levels — body, soul, and spirit. As our personal development progresses, our idea of God becomes more expanded and profound. The Spirit reorders all the disorders that we experience in ourselves so that we can express the divine energy appropriately on each level of our being.

"According to quantum physics, various levels of material energy can occupy the same physical space at the same time. In similar fashion, the divine energy can be at work in us at levels that cannot be perceived at all. That does not mean they are not real or present. On the level of grace, faith is purified of attachments and excessive dependency on ways that are good as stepping stones, but inadequate to manifest the full range of the divine presence and action. The spiritual journey as such may drop out of our immediate awareness. The divine energy is most powerful when it is least perceived by our faculties. When we sit down to do Centering Prayer and form our intention, we know the divine presence is already there. We do not create it. All we have to do is consent. The divine energy flows into us and through us. In its purest form it is available twenty-four hours a day at maximum strength. By consenting, we open to God as God is without trying to figure out who or what God is. We consent to the divine presence without depending on a medium to express it, translate it, or interpret it in terms of our personal history, cultural conditioning, and temperamental bias. God communicates himself on only one condition: our consent. Visions, consolations, experiences, psychological breakthroughs, all have value but only a limited value, pointing us to the maximum value, which is the whole of God in pure faith. This faith, once it is established as a conviction, changes our perspective of who we are and who God is. It operates appropriately through the theological virtues and the Seven Gifts of the Spirit, enabling us to respond to the realities and routines of daily life and to perceive the divine presence in the ordinary, in the insignificant, and even in suffering.

"There remains a further energy, which is reserved for the next life. That is what theologians call the Beatific Vision. This requires freedom from the limitations of the physical body in order to experience it. This energy is so intense that if it were not mediated by the ordinary affairs of daily life that distract us from continual contact with the divine energy, we would turn into a grease spot. This is the energy that lights the universe and forms the whirling nebulae. We can receive only a little of it at a time. In heaven we can have all we want. We can sink our teeth, so to speak, into the divine essence, because then our bodies will be glorified and able to handle that energy."