What is personal prayer?

For a Christian to pray is to relax into the reality of being loved by God. It also means rising into the realism of loving like Christ. On its own, the first half of my description might be too cosy. The second gives it grit, energy, purpose. Prayer involves a certain resting with God. But it can also make a different to this world of woundedness. Sometimes we need to hear the first half, to learn to trust ourselves and God. At other times we are ripe for the challenge of the second half: with hearts transformed by the Spirit we are enabled to heal some of the pain around.

From Letters on Prayer (Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1994).

To immerse oneself in silence has become a luxury within the rhythms of today. To many people it seems strange to set time aside for total quiet; to me it seems strange not to. There the heart tunes into a wavelength that is otherwise unreachable. It is rescued from the blinkers of the practical. What seems like withdrawal opens out into deeper involvement with everything and everyone.

This kind of silence is a healing and strengthening space, a place where the daily dishonest gap between words and deeds is bridged. This time of listening adjusts the heart's uncertain compass towards the north - of love. Without that acid test of giving and compassion, the whole effort count be only a self-journey. In a real exposure to silence there is little room for such dishonest games. Indeed there is nothing special about inner silence - except that, as life goes on, it becomes the best language of learning wisdom. It is also our safest language for God, well beyond the groping of mere words.

Adapted from Where is your God? (Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1991), published in USA as Losing God ( Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, CT, 1992), from Chapter 3.


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