The house stood on a corner, at the junction of two roads. It was not only a meeting place for roads, but also for young people. They would gather on the broad grass verge most evenings. The excitement would mount as they competed to be more outrageous than the next. The shouting would get louder, the language more coarse and the vandalism would start. Only the public telephone box was safe from attack; it was needed to order their drugs.

The occupant of the house dreaded the summer months with their long evenings, for this was when the problem was at its worst. Day by day the anger and frustration within him would grow. Confrontation did not work. Parents and police did not seem to care.

But he was someone who prayed and, very occasionally, he listened. One evening he felt God say “watch”. It was not a spoken word that was heard, but more a moment of inner clarity that could not be ignored. Perhaps he listened this time because his own answers had failed and despair was closing in. He could have listened before, but until now he had been too full of himself. The Christian tradition would call this wordless voice the Holy Spirit.

So the man who prayed positioned a chair behind the thick net curtains and began to watch. He could see, but could not be seen.

The first thing he watched, however, was not the scene in front of him, but his own mind. He observed all the thoughts of anger and injustice that bombarded his consciousness and he allowed them to be. They were not wrong and deserved acknowledgement, but tonight he was not going to become them. Then he gently moved his attention to his body and for a while became aware of each part in turn. Finally, he opened his mind to the very experience of being alive; a vibrant, mysterious patch of consciousness in the world. He marvelled at this fact. His mind became very still.

Then, with a wordless prayer that he might truly see, he opened his eyes and began to pay attention to the scene in front of him. He had looked upon it many times before but had never really seen it. He had only ever seen his own mind, he now realised. He had only seen his own fear and anger about that milling, shouting, threatening crowd. Now, gradually, from a still mind, the truth was revealed. It was fascinating.

Whereas before he had seen aggressive, strutting, loud young people, now he saw their uncertainty, their fear, their desperate need to be accepted by the group. He saw how they competed with each other for the attention of the opposite sex; how they constantly watched everyone else for signals as to how they were being viewed; how they looked at every car that passed to make sure that their outrageous behaviour had been noticed. As he watched, memories of his own adolescence came to mind.

And, slowly, compassion arose. Not the idea of compassion, but that vast spaciousness of love to which the word can only point. All the thoughts of fear, anger and condemnation were still present, but now they were but pinpricks in a majestic, wonderful background. Before they had been everything; all that he thought he was. Now he was the limitless space in which they were held. He had paid attention and seen the truth.

After a while he found his attention being drawn to one particular lad, about thirteen years old. The boy had a subtly different energy to him compared with the others. A dark, disturbed aura seemed to surround him. The man who prayed watched as the behaviour of the lad became increasingly extreme, the language more foul and the shouting more loud. He watched as the young man eventually began to attack a road sign, becoming more and more frustrated as it resisted his ministrations.

Before, what he was watching would have enraged the man who prayed. But tonight was different. In the stillness of his mind, as he paid attention, he saw in the lad’s face something that touched his heart. Beneath the violence and the anger, there was great pain. Everything that was happening was rooted in that pain. The man who prayed did not see the “idea” of pain; did not imagine he saw it because a book on psychology told him that he should. He saw the pain directly, in an explosion of realisation. He felt the pain.

As he continued to watch, astonishingly, the man who prayed became glad that the boy was attacking the road sign. He knew, in a way he did not understand, that the lad’s pain was so great that it had to have an outlet. If the victim had not been the road sign, it would have been someone else, or the boy himself.

As the sky darkened and the crowd began to disperse, the man who prayed realised that he had rarely felt as much love for anyone as he did in that moment for that boy – as he continued to vandalise the road sign.

In contemplation there are no coincidences.

The next day the man who prayed was walking to the shops when he met an elderly woman who had lived in the area for many years. Without any prompting, she started to complain about all the trouble being caused by the young people. After, a while, however, the tone of her voice changed and became much softer. She began to talk about the young man who, unbeknown to her, he had watched so intently the previous evening. She spoke about how he had once been such a lovely child who used to visit her home. But then his parent’s marriage had broken up and his mother had had a succession of boyfriends. When they were around, the lad was not welcome at home. Now, the old lady said, she did not know the young man, but she remembered what he had once been. Shaking her head sadly, she walked away.

In contemplation there are moments when we glimpse the truth of how God sees us. In contemplation there are moments when we taste the love that God has for us.