How can human beings respond to love?  Only by returning love.  Anything else would be unworthy of true love.  The spiritual life desires to give a fitting and "corresponding" response to the love of God, but nothing remains but faith, hope and love for the unfolding of the response to love.  The three "godly virtues", as they were called in the language of the Middle Ages, surround a mystery which in turn corresponds fully to the mystery of the spiritual life. The mystery is that we cannot give ourselves these inner attitudes.  We cannot "earn" them through performance.  Rather they stand before us as God's offer which we can receive or reject, or to which we can open ourselves or close ourselves.  We can create room in ourselves for these gifts or we can allow this space to be filled with our "ego", with our addiction to the "I".

Whenever we open ourselves, whenever we accept God's offer in Christ through the Holy Spirit and allow this gift to penetrate and "stamp" us(see pg. 21ff) more and more, then we establish in our self a place where God's self can be present.  God waited for the "yes" of Mary in order to come as a human being in our world.  This original mystery of Christian presence is realized in those moments when we make room in our life for faith, hope (trust) and love.  Thereby we give God's very self a place in which God can be present in, with and under our presence, in our living space and thereby in our world.  Thus God's presence is able to be grasped, seen, heard and felt by the people we encounter in so far as they do not close themselves off from this reality.