The most common experience when reading these Meditations is that they open up a dialogue with the Eternal, and a new logic, the heavenly way of reasoning, begins to filter deep inside us. We feel that we become better, and discover a yearning, almost a homesickness, for heaven.

And that turns us to face our everyday life 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 the driving theme of the book, in fulfilling 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)