Reflection
There is only one thing wrong with the traditional definition of prayer, it misrepresents God. “Prayer”, the old teaching said, was ”the lifting up of the mind and heart to God.”As if God were some regal distant judge outside ourselves. But science- with its new perception that matter and spirit are of a piece, sometimes particles sometimes energy- suggests that God is not on a cloud somewhere, imperious and suspecting. God is the very energy that animates us. God is not male humanity writ large. God is the spirit that leads us and drives us on. God is the voice within us calling us to Life. God is the reality trying to come to fullness within us, both individually and together. It is to that cosmic God, that personal, inner, enkindling God, that we pray.
Joan Chittister, OSB
Prayer
God’s spirit dwells within me.
Action
Examine your image of God. How does it affect your prayer. Consider the concept that God is not far away but within. How does that impact your prayer?
Suggested Reading
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?
1 Corinthians 3:16
The kingdom of God is within you.
Luke 17:21
We are not made to run all the time, we have an inner life that cannot always be neglected.”
— Pope Francis
There is a mighty lot of difference between saying prayers and praying.
John G. Lake
Prayer is not a discourse. It is a form of life, the life with God. That is why it is not confined to the moment of verbal statement.
Jaques Ellul
Faith in our time requires us to grow up and learn to relate with God in a new way. As co-creators with our creative God, we are invited and challenged to relate as adults to an adult God, modelled for Christians in the adult life-example of Jesus.
Diarmuid O’Murchu
The cosmos is like a living sacred text that we can learn to read and interpret. Just as we prayerfully ponder the words of the Bible in Christian practice, and as other traditions study their sacred texts, so we are invited to listen to the life of creation as an ongoing, living utterance of God.
J. Philip Newell
At the root of our being we are one with God, one with one another, one with the world in which we live.
William H. Shannon