Reflection
The truly prayerful person, the person adult in the ways of the Spirit, does not pray to get things. We pray to know God in every small way we can here so that we ourselves can become more like the God we seek. To bring ourselves to sense the God-life within us, to sit in silence and allow the soul to be nourished under the impulse of the Spirit is to grow in wisdom and age and grace. It lifts us above the tumult of the world around us. It deepens our understanding of what it is to live in the sight of God. It brings us closer to seeing God face to face, heart to heart, mind to mind. We do not go to prayer to coax God to create the world according to our own personal designs and fancies. We are there to learn how to live well in the life and world we have.
Joan Chittister
Prayer
Be still and know that I am God.
Action
Examine your own pattern of prayer.
Suggested Reading
Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.
Jeremiah 33:3
But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to God who is unseen. Then God, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Matthew 6:6
What truly is prayer? It is first of all a dialogue, a personal relationship with God.
Pope Francis
Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see it, all men, and all the history of mankind, in the light of God. To pray ‘in spirit and in truth’ enables us to enter into contact with that infinite love, that inscrutable freedom which is at work behind the complexities and the intricacies of human existence
Thomas Merton
For prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.
Saint Teresa of Avila
Where there is much prayer, there will be much of the Spirit; where there is much of the Spirit, there will be ever-increasing prayer.”
Andrew Murray
n prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
John Bunyan
Does God have 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
Dorothy Day
The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.
Georges Bernanos
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
Soren Kierkegaard