Contemplative practice gradually teaches us to be present to reality as it really is, just like God. This includes being present to the truth of who we are, present to our glories and our gifts, but also to our pain, our wounds, our brokenness, our shadows, and the parts of ourselves that we want so badly to hide from others and from ourselves. Letting go of illusions and coming face-to-face with ourselves as God sees us can be one of the most challenging aspects of contemplation, and yet, strangely, one of the most beautiful. We must be careful not to view the limited and broken side of ourselves as the curse of humanity. A true contemplative will recognize these things as a reflection of the same humanity that saw Jesus rejoicing sweating, laughing, and crying, and the same humanity with which God identified and loved fully when he died on the cross. We may not be perfect reflections of God, but we are, in our totality, honest reflections of Christ: glorious and radiant, but also broken, lonely, in pain, defeated – yet still beloved children of the Father. In contemplation see our limits and our brokenness, but honestly, not as a disfiguring of our Divine image, but as a key part of it.