Catholic higher education in the United States faces some difficulties in common with higher education in the United States more generally, some difficulties specific to the Catholic Church, and some difficulties specific to Catholic education in the United States more generally. At the same time, institutions of Catholic higher education possess potentialities for renewal, including those that that can be activated in pursuit of their mission to cultivate the awareness of God. What might happen if administrators, officers, faculty, trustees and students understood Catholic institutions of higher education as actively oriented toward cultivating the awareness of God? What if institutional advancement were pursued through this kind of cultivation with the sort of planning and prioritization given to cultivation of financial donors? These questions are probably too pointed to make a difference, but they serve as a helpful introduction to this passage from Chapter 1 of The Presence of God by Fr. Anselm Moynihan O.P.:
The awareness of God which a Catholic should have is a supernatural thing, flowing from the divinely-infused virtue of faith in his intelligence. It is, therefore, a divine gift, but like other divine gifts it can and must be cultivated. Its cultivation consists in what is called the exercise of the presence of God. There is no practice more vital to our spiritual growth; for the presence of God is indeed the very sunlight of the soul, bringing every virtue to flower and fruitfulness. Just as we draw light and warmth and vigor from walking in the sun, says a seventeenth-century Dominican writer, so by keeping ourselves in God’s presence will we draw from him the spiritual light of wisdom, the soul’s warmth of charity and its energy of zeal in doing good. This is little more than a paraphrase of St. Paul’s appeal to the Ephesians to live as men “native to the light; where the light has its effect, all is goodness and holiness and truth” (Eph. 5:8-9).
At some time or other we have all encountered people who have learned to walk continually in the presence of God, and we have seen in them the radiance of those “native to the light.” They strike us as men who “breathe an air from another country; compared with other men, they are as the living compared with the dead; or better still, they are like men awake, while the rest are tortured by dreams and haunted of the unreal” (Belloc).
— Fr. Anselm Moynihan, O.P., The Presence of God, pp. 4-5.