The writer of Psalm 8 does not speak about creation in any merely objective sense: he refers everything to God. He says, the heavens are "your heavens" and they are "the work of your fingers." This ability to see God in all of creation comes from contemplation, for the writer starts of by saying "When I behold." He looked, but not merely with the eyes of the body; he looked with the eyes of the soul, the eyes of faith, and so the beauty of the heavens with their countless stars, reveals to him the beauty of God.

During his intense spiritual experience, which became his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius went walking along the river Cardoner one day. He sat down on the river-bank and gazed at the water flowing below. He had a deep mystical experience and, according to his own account, learned much about the Blessed Trinity and about human affairs. Significantly, he had this profound spiritual illumination, not while looking up to heaven and not while praying in a church or adoring Jesus in the Eucharist but while looking down at a very ordinary part of God's creation .