Daily Reading for June 24 • The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Once we owned a cat named Nora who seemed to have set up shop at a middling level on the ascent to God. Placid and fat, Nora spent her mornings lying in a pool of sunlight near the back door, and sometimes she gazed into the distance as if she were seeing something of great importance hidden from the rest of us. Then she would pad away from the door to dip water from the toilet or present us with a hair ball. For these reasons I decided that Nora had arrived at the feline equivalent of the illuminative way. The chief characteristic of the illuminative way is a heightened awareness of God’s presence which comes about as the capacities of one’s personality come habitually to be directed toward what is most real and genuinely human.

From From Image to Likeness: The Christian Journey into God by William A. Simpson (Continuum, 1997).