Evening Prayer:

I am grateful to my students simply because they exist and because they are what they are.
I am grateful to you, O God for having placed me among them and for having told me to be their teacher. But finally, i am grateful to you, O God because i am now more often alone. Not that i run away from my students, yet sometimes i do not know myself in them. At other times, i find myself in them and with them. Indeed, spiritual direction is sometimes an experiment in recognition: they recognise something new in themselves and i in myself: for you, O God recognise yourself in us.

amen...

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)