You set before me the book of Nature; and I understood how all the flowers created by You are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all flowers wanted to be roses, Nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wild flowers... It is the same in the world of souls, Your living garden.
Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware, that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that source.