Action and contemplation are in no wise enemies. In fact, to honour contemplation is to make action truly beneficial, broad, deep, well paced, enriched. A higher light always brings more order and more unity to our lives and to our activity. This is a given. This is what it means to be human: a higher light overflows onto all our other activities, and all our activities are pulled into one in the measure that our life takes on the simple shape of being one.

This is not less true of contemplation of the roads – seeing Jesus in our neighbours – than it is of contemplation in the cloister. When we perceive Jesus present in, behind, through, and with our neighbours, we will necessarily act differently, at least tangentially and in intention. Perhaps our actions are not changed in one second; but they must be on the route to being changed. We cannot keep our eyes open and walk worse than we did with our eyes closed. While we talk on the phone with a man and are unsure that it is him or his brother to whom we’re speaking, we can behave more ambiguously; but when we know the man, by seeing or hearing better, then our actions take on a more definite form. Similarly, Jean-Pierre de Caussade SJ notes in the Abandonment to Divine Providence,

He who knows that a certain person in disguise is the king, behaves towards him very differently to another who, only perceiving an ordinary man, treats him accordingly.

To see Jesus in others isn’t the same thing as to act towards others as if Jesus were in them. Our sight and our actions may line up more or less. But to see opens up possibilities which were not present before we opened our eyes.