We might say that the key to the whole problem is the omnipresence of God.  “He sees God aright who sees Him in all things”; and he sees things aright who sees God’s presence within them.  The burden of what the men of prayer have to tell us in this connection is just this; that if you fail to see God in things you fail to see the things themselves; and in consequence, if you love them, you are not really loving the things themselves but a part of them.  And when you isolate this partial vision, and love it, you tend to make your love a form of self-love—you tend to love things for what they can give you, you, and always you—and so indeed you set yourself up against God, and so indeed creatures are a stumbling-block.  But if, on the other hand, you realize that God is “all in all,” that He is what is inmost in things as well as what is infinitely apart from them, and that they are meant precisely to bring you to know Him—the visible things, as St Paul tells us, are meant precisely to teach us of the invisible—and if, therefore, you learn to love things not partially but wholly, then indeed you love all things, and love them the more passionately for loving them wholly, but at the same time you love nothing but God; there is no rivalry, there is only the all-inclusive universality of the Divine Love Itself.  –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’

Father Gerald Vann