When we have prayed prayers long enough, all the words drop away and we begin to live in the presence of God. Then prayer is finally real. When we find ourselves sinking into the world around us with a sense of purpose, an inner light and deep and total trust that whatever happens is right for us, then we have become prayer.
When we kneel down, we admit the magnitude of God in the universe and our own smallness in the face of it. When we stand with hands raised,we recognize the presence of God in life and our own inner glory because of it. All life is in the hands of God. Even the desire to pray is the grace to pray. The movement to pray is the movement of God in our souls.
Our ability to pray depends on the power and place of God in our life. We pray because God attracts us and we pray only because God is attracting us. We are not, in other words, even the author of our own prayer life. It is the goodness of God, not any virtue that we have developed on our own, that brings us to the heart of God. And it is with God’s help that we seek to go there.
Joan Chittister: The Monastic Way, collected in In My Own Words - with thanks to Inward/Outward
3 comments:
I loved this so much that I emailed it to all my friends with a link to subscribe to "Inward/Outward." I thought of posting it, but since you have, I won't.
This is beautiful.
I ended up posting it anyway. It is so good. I need to keep reading it and contemplating the words.
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