In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.
Long, discursive, dry, and inane are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall like a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing prayers they are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath. The deader they are the longer they grow.
Prayer did not come easily to me for I always feel that prayer is a silent things, and opening of the heart. To ask for earthly benefits, to reel out a list of requirements and expect them to be supplied is not prayer. It is putting God in the same category as an intelligent grocer.
If outer events bring him to a position where he can bear them no longer and force him to cry out to the higher power in helplessness for relief, or if inner feelings bring humiliation and recognition of his dependence on that power, this crushing of the ego may open the door to grace.
Temples and churches have become social centers. They have lost their original purpose because the minds of the people are more attracted to worldly things than to prayer. The lips repeat the prayer mechanically like a phonograph record, but the mind wanders to other places. (23-24)
Worry, my son?...I am not worried now and I never have or will. You must learn to tell worry from thought, and thought from prayer. Sometimes a light will go from your life...and your life becomes a prayer, till you are strong enough to stand under the weight of your own thought again.
When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God’s throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people.
I know we sort of said goodbye, but I don’t have anyone else to tell this to and I’m going to burst with it. You know EBB’s verse:God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,And thrusts the thing we have prayed For in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in it. –
Hadn’t retired reporter Stan warned him of how protective Cosimo was of his granddaughters? What if the Carusos had discovered his identity and wanted to rub him out as they’d rubbed out his father?Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now andat the hour of our death.
God thank you for everything you've given us. For the time we have together. And for the miracle of Christmas. Thank you for the Atonement, the chance to start all over again. Help us to always remember who we are and to trust that we are worthy to make it through our storms. Amen>
Learn to pray. Pray often. Pray in your mind, in your heart. Pray on your knees. Prayer is your personal key to heaven. The lock is on your side of the veil. And I have learned to conclude all my prayers with ‘Thy will be done’ (Matthew 6:10; see also Luke 11:2; 3 Nephi 13:10).
Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
[Praying] demands that you take to the road again and again, leaving your house and looking forward to a new land for yourself and your [fellow human]. This is why praying demands poverty, that is, the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you always begin afresh.
Practicing the Presence of God is bringing our “heart” – body, soul, and mind – to God, to be in His Presence – to love Him, to worship Him, to lay our troubles and triumphs with Him, to rest in Him. What a glorious idea….but few of us ever find that rest!
This message God was communicating to mankind, this Gospel of Jesus, was a message to the heart as much as to the head, that the methodology was as important as the message itself, that the message could not be presented accurately outside of the emotions within which these truths were embedded.
