On Prayer...

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6335922691387955592.post-68896063447782015762007-03-29T15:47:00.000-07:002007-03-31T18:30:10.314-07:00On Prayer..."It is always just possible that Jesus Christ meant what He said when He told us to seek the secret place and close the door." - C.S. Lewis, 'Heaven, Earth, and Outer Space,' Decision (Oct 1963) "Every day at communion time, I communicate two of my feelings to Jesus. One is gratefulness, because he has helped me to persevere until today. The other is a request: teach me to pray." - Mother Theresa, In My Own Words. "Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomlete persons (ouselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us." - C.S. Lewis, The World's Last Night, ch. 1. "On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wak someday and take offence, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return." - Annie Dillard, An Expedition to the Pole. Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at his disposition, and listening to his voice in the depths of our hearts. - Mother Theresa, In My Own Words "I admire those eighteenth-century Hasids who understood the risk of prayer. Rabbi Uri of Strelisk took sorrowful leave of his household every morning because he was setting off to his prayers. He told his family how to dispose of his manuscripts if praying should kill him." - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life. "I am asked what is one to do to be sure that one is following the way of salvation. I answer: "Love God. And, above all, pray." - Mother Theresa, In My Own Words. "...One day I was trying to dig a trench for a sewer line - no small task in a world of frozen trundra. An Eskimo man whose face and hands displayed the leathery toughness of many winters came by and watched me for a while. Finally he said simply and profoundly, "You are digging a ditch to the glory of God." He said it to encourage me, I know. And I have never forgotten his words. Beyond my Eskimo friend no human being ever knew or cared whether I dug that ditch well or poorly. In time it was to be covered up and forgotten. But because of my friend's words, I dug with all my might, for every shovelful of dirt was a prayer to God. Even though I did not know it at the time, I was attempting in my small and unsophisticated way to do what the great artisans of the Middle Ages did when they carved the back of a piece of art, knowing that God alone would see it. Anthony Bloom writes, 'A prayer makes sense only if it is lived. Unless they are lived, unless life and prayer become completely interwoven, prayers become some sort of a polite madrigal which you offer to God at moments when you are giving time to him.' The work of our hands & of our minds is acted-out prayer, a love offering to the living God." - Richard Foster, Praying the Ordinary - Seeking the Kingdom. The most effective way Brother Lawrence had for communicating with God was to simply do his ordinary work. He did this obediently, out of a pure love of God, purifying it as much as was humanly possible. He believed it was a serious mistake to think of our prayer time as being different from any other. Our actions should unite us with God when we are involved in our daily activities, just as our prayers unite us with Him in our quiet devotions. - Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, p 24 Lord, you are great, and most worthy of praise; great is your worth and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And man, a fragment of your creation, desires to praise you – man, carrying round with him his own mortality, carrying round with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you ‘resist the proud’, yet desires to praise you, he, a fragment of your creation. You prompt him to take delight in praising you, because you made us for yourself, and <a name="OLE_LINK2"></a><a name="OLE_LINK1">our heart is restless until it find rest in you.</a> Grant to me, Lord, to know and understand whether I should first call upon you or praise you, and to know you before I call on you. – Augustine, Confessions 1.1 "Prayer makes your heart bigger, until is is capable of containing the gift of God himself." - Mother Theresa, In My Own Words. Reflections? Quotations to Share? Post a comment here. PRAYcanadahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12178010409136997493noreply@blogger.com