St Therese of the Child Jesus: “The Doctor of doctors teaches us without the sound of words. I have never heard him speak, and yet I know he is within my soul. Every moment he is guiding and inspiring me, and, just at the moment I need them, ‘lights’ till then unseen are granted me. Most often it is not at prayer that they come but while I go about my daily duties”
A Christian does not grow as a Christian if their faith is gradually replaced by a new kind of worldliness. There is a temptation – under the guise of liturgy, or spirituality, or evangelization – to return to the world from which we were saved. We can see this clearly in the question of the Pharisees about the coming of the Kingdom of God. The Pharisees are not preparing themselves to leave this world and go to God, but rather to harness divine authority and ensconce themselves in positions of worldly power and influence. They would like a kingdom of God because God is invisible and therefore absent. If God is absent from His own kingdom, that means the Pharisees could be in charge since God isn’t going to make a bunch of “important temporal decisions” anyway. The distance between the terms is almost negligible: “ruling in God’s place,” “ruling in place of God,” “there is no God,” and “I am a god.”