A Loving Sight

We cannot know anything as it really is,
unless we have learnt to look at it
with self-forgetful reverence,
with admiration—
in fact with the eyes of worship—
seeing it not for our sake,
not mainly interested in its usefulness,
but for its own sake,
as an independent creature of God,
existing for him and to him in its own right.
‘Contemplation’, said our earliest English mystic
[Richard Rolle], ‘is a loving sight’,
and there is a contemplative element in all real worship.

–from Worship (1936), by Evelyn Underhill

‍