A lectio divina theme: prayer
An old abba was asked what was necessary to please God and to pray... He was sitting making rope. Without glancing up, he said, “You’re looking at it.” Just as so many of the mystics have taught, doing what you’re doing with care, presence, and intention is a form of prayer, the very way to transformation and wholeness. There is no trick, no magic formula ... there is only living… –-Fr. Richard Rohr
The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They’re full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don’t fall for that nonsense. This is your Father you are dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need. With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply. Like this: Our Father in heaven, Reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what’s best— as above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the devil. You’re in charge! You can do anything you want! You’re ablaze in beauty! Yes. Yes. Yes.
--- gospel of Matthew 6: 7-13; Eugene Peterson, the Message version
A sunlit absence is: a moving away from identifying with turbulent ever-changing thoughts and obsessions and emotions. We cultivate the absence of them; and rather cultivate the voluminous summit of presence and awareness. It is a pathless path of still prayer. – Martin Laird , from A Sunlit Absence
Authentic prayer is opening to God’s gracious presence with all that we are.. Therefore prayer is more a way of being than an isolated act of doing. Prayer is aimed at our deepest problem: our tendency to forget our liberating connectedness with God. Quiet, contemplative prayer happens when we are still and open ourselves to Christ’s Spirit working secretly in us: “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps 46:10). These are times when we trustingly sink into God’s formless hands for cleansing, illumination, and communion. We are in a state of quiet appreciation, simply hollowed out for God. Here is the “home” of God in us, where we are most together, “I pray that Christ will dwell in your hearts through faith” (Paul, Ephesians 3:17). Prayer is the bridge to this home. –— Tilden Edwards
I have abandoned all particular forms of devotion, all prayer techniques. My only prayer practice is attention. I carry on a habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God that fills me with overwhelming joy. …Prayer is not a technique for getting things, a pious exercise that somehow makes God happy or a requirement for entry to heaven. It is much more like practicing heaven now by leaping into communion with what is right in front of us.—Brother Lawrence
Abraham J Heschel: Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.
To pray is to listen to the One who calls you “my beloved daughter,” “my beloved son,” “my beloved child.” To pray is to let that voice speak to the center of your being, your guts. Let that voice resound in your whole being…You have to pray. You have to listen to the voice who calls you the beloved, because otherwise you will run around begging for affirmation, for praise, for success. And then you're not free. -– Henri Nouwen
We sit in prayer, renewing our faith that we’re sitting there in God’s presence all about us and within us, closer to us than we are to ourselves. And we’ve come here with no other intention, but a kind of rendezvous with God, as a way to turn to God to help us to deepen our experience of God’s presence in our life. That’s why we’re there. It’s a moment of intimacy, of devotional sincerity, of deepening this union with God inprayer. -–James Finley
Within prayer you quite simply receive and return God’s gaze of love. God is recognizing God’s Self in you, and you are recognizing yourself in God. -- William Mcnamara
When I am liberated by silence when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively, no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. –Thomas Merton
prayer isn’t our way of aligning God with us, but His way of aligning us with Him.
prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us. —-PRH
By contemplative prayer, we mean the deliberate seeking of God through a willingness to detach from the passing self, the tyranny of emotions, the addiction to self-image, and the false promises of the world. Dis-traction means literally “being pulled apart”. —Fr. Richard Rohr
“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes (prays) with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for us according to the will of God” —- letter to the Romans, 8:26-27— apostle Paul
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know it’s for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval and pleasure.
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action within. Amen. —Welcoming Prayer by Thomas Keating
