Quote of the day

All things were made to lead us to God. As a matter of fact, though, most things turn us away from him. The only puzzle to be solved is to make the things which turn us away from God become means to lead us to him. … It is we, by the bad use we make of things, who render them blockades between him and us. There is therefore no other problem than to transform these very same things, the things that make up our daily lives, from obstacles into means. And it is there, then, that our temporal activities, our work in the world, become the very material, we might say, for our practice of the spiritual life–means for going towards God. At that moment, we shall have caught on to the unity of our life. A day that can be spent in the most total banality, taken up by the purely human aspects of work, and bringing me in the evening only a kind of frightful void–it is up to me to transfigure it by a miracle of the heart and to invest it with a kind of incorruptible substance.

– Jean Cardinal Daniélou, The Scandal of Truth