The most common experience when reading these Meditations is that they open up a dialogue with the Eternal, and the reader finds a new logic, the heavenly way of reasoning, begins to filter into the soul. We feel that we become better, and we discover a yearning, almost a homesickness, for heaven. And that turns us to face our everyday life, with its everyday struggles and all our everyday neighbours, with renewed resolution. We wish to care for others in the most realistic and down-to-earth way possible. Indeed, we feel enabled to take part in fulfilling the driving theme in the Meditations, the prayer with which Jesus summed up his life-work, uttered to his Father the night before he died: ‘May they all be one.’ (John 17:21)
