responsible for the whole of a creature’s being, cannot be imagined as “between” the creature and God. As he does when speaking of the Eucharist, Thomas here uses Aristotelian language but in a decidedly non-Aristotelian way, signaling that something else, metaphysically speaking, is the case. God is therefore properly discovered as the deepest ground of the creature’s ontological identity. Thomas Merton was entirely in a Thomist frame of mind when he said that contemplative prayer is finding that