A tweet from Pope Francis the other day asked: “Are our lives truly filled with the presence of God? How many things take the place of God in my life each day?”
Some time, about two hundred years ago a good and wise Englishman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote these words which to me suggest that he was not too far from the truth himself:
“Another and more fruitful, perhaps more solid, inference from the facts (he was referring to our material existence and the world around us) would be, that there is something in the human mind which makes it know that in all finite quantity, there is an infinite, in all measures of time an eternal; that the latter are the basis, the substance, of the former; and that, as we truly are only as far as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess, that is, enjoy our being or any other real good, but by living in the sense of His holy presence.” This may be open to a somewhat pantheistic interpretation but if Blessed John Henry Newman was happy to quote it then I am happy to be moved by it.