Time & Perspective Quote by Evelyn Underhill

Underhill turns time itself into liturgy. By calling the present moment a "sacrament", she smuggles the language of church ritual into ordinary experience, insisting that the divine isn’t mainly accessed through special atmospheres or rare breakthroughs but through the stubborn, unglamorous now. The line works because it collapses a familiar spiritual loophole: the habit of postponing attention. If God is "always coming", then waiting for a better mood, a cleaner conscience, or a more meaningful circumstance becomes a form of refusal.

The phrasing is also slyly corrective. "Meet and receive Him there" echoes Eucharistic cadence, with its bodily, participatory verbs, not the armchair spirituality of ideas. Underhill’s God is not an abstract concept to be reasoned about but a presence to be hosted. "Gratitude" is the key demand: not sentimentality, but an active stance that turns whatever is happening - irritation, boredom, grief, domestic repetition - into material for communion. Gratitude reframes the moment as gift, which is another way of saying: stop treating your actual life as the obstacle to your spiritual life.

Context matters. Underhill wrote in an early 20th-century Britain shaken by modernity and war, and she became one of the era’s most influential interpreters of mysticism for lay readers. This line reads like a democratizing manifesto: you don’t need a monastery, just attention. The subtext is bracingly anti-escapist. The only altar guaranteed to exist is the one you’re standing in front of right now.