Knowing God

Our discovery of God is, in a way, God's discovery of us. We cannot go to heaven to find him because we have no way of knowing where heaven is or what it is. He comes down from heaven and finds us. He looks at us from the depths of his own infinite actuality, which is everywhere, and his seeing us gives us a new being and a new mind in which we also discover him. We only know him in so far as we are known by him, and our contemplation of him is a participation in his contemplation of himself. We become contemplatives when God discovers himself in us.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation