"Proper receptivity and gratitude lie at the root of purity of heart, they are the real beatitudes. Matthew 5:8 could just as easily be rendered: 'Blessed are those who are grateful, who see and appreciate everything as gift, for they shall see God.'

"But gratitude like all virtues is, in the end, the result of a discipline. Former generations expressed this in the slogan: Count your blessings. To become grateful and to remain so, it is necessary to practice the asceticism of joy. The greatest compliment that one can give to the giver of a gift is to thoroughly delight in the gift. We owe it to our creator to delight, in gratitude, in the gift of life and creation.

"Thus, the first exercise we must do to restore our contemplative faculty to its full powers is to work at receiving everything — life, health, others around us, love, friendship, food, drink, sexuality, beauty — as gift. Becoming a more grateful person is the first, and the most important step, that there is in overcoming the practical atheism that besets our everyday lives. To the extent that we take life for granted we will never see the Giver behind the gift. Conversely, though, once we stop taking life for granted we will, soon enough, begin to feel it as granted to us by God.

"The first proof for the existence of God is not theoretical. It is the practical reversal of the Adam and Eve story within our lives: live in deep gratitude, count blessings, and see whether God is absent from ordinary consciousness."