How happy shall we be if by leaving these few, petty things we can arrive at so high an estate!”
— St. Teresa of Avilia on Contemplative Prayer
Why pray?
Let’s see what some spiritual masters have to say…
“Sometimes, by God’s grace, a prayer is heard.”
What’s prayer? It’s shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who’s to say? It’s reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish in the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell him sins that he already knows full well. You seek to change his changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast. Prayer is the wind that fills his sail. Else waves would dash him on the rocks, or he would drift with witless tides. And sometimes, by God’s grace, a prayer is heard.
— Frederick Buechner from the novel Godric about a monk
“We should never make prayer too complicated… Jesus taught us to come like little children to a father.” — Richard J. Foster in Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth
Prayer enables us to be immersed in what is fundamentally and truly divine in life right now. It is not meant to be a bridge to somewhere else because God is not somewhere else. God is here. Prayer is the act of beginning the process of becoming one with the One we seek– eventually, melting into God completely.
This can be accomplished through immersion in the Sacred Scriptures. As Christians, what drives us is not has Jesus died but who Jesus is and why Jesus died. How he defines life and death will become our own understanding if we live prayerful lives.
— Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister
“And forgive us our trespasses…”
As a tree torn from the soil, as a river separated from its source, the human soul wanes when detached from what is greater than itself. Without the holy, the good turns chaotic; without the good, beauty becomes accidental…
We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting.
Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy. For when we betake ourseles to the extreme opposite of the ego, we can behold a situation from the aspect of God.
Prayer is a way to master what is inferior in us, to discern between the vital and the futile … by seeing our fate in proportion to God.
However, prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness…
Prayer makes visible the right and reveals what is hampering and false…
Sometimes prayer is more than a light before us; it is a light within us.
__ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in his 1954 classic Man’s Quest for God
Just do it.
Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that He expects each of us to follow?
I doubt it. I believe some people– lots of people– pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people.
Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?
— Dorothy Day
Prayer may not save us, but it will make us worthy to be saved.”
— Rabbi Heschel
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