glorycloud's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- God alone teaches us to pray It is in the death flow 9:55 AM Wednesday morning. It is in the 50's this morning, a cold wet dark gray morning. I believe the sun has been destroyed. The earth has become a playground for the living dead. I am down in the lower level writing on one of our lap top computers. Carol has gone to bed for the day. Existence keeps decaying. The Lord is on His throne. Last night I was reading for evening worship from a book titled, "The School Of Jesus Christ" by Pere Jean Nicolas Grou, S.J. Translated by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell. I came across something that spoke to me in my present spiritual state concerning prayer. I will now quote Grou. "It is the heart that prays it is evident that sometimes, and even habitually, it can pray by itself, with no assistance from words either expressed or mental. This is a fact that few people realize, and many absolutely reject. The insist on the necessity of definite, formal acts, interior if not external, which must be distinctly perceptible, and of which the soul must be conscious: apart from such acts they recognize no prayer. They are mistaken, and God has not yet taught them how the heart prays. It prays as the mind thinks. Now thought is formed in the mind before it is clothed in words. The proof of this fact is that we often search for the right word, and reject one after the other till we find one which expresses our thought precisely. We need words to make us intelligible to others; but they are of no use to us in our own minds, then if we were pure spirit we should use no language, either to formulate or to communicate our thoughts. It is the same in the case of the heart and its feelings. The heart conceives feelings, adopts them, and put them in practice without any need of resorting to words, unless it wishes to express them outwardly or make them manifest to itself. But God reads the secrets of the heart; He perceives its most intimate sentiments, even those that are neither formulated in the mind nor perceived in the soul. And if these should be religious and supernatural sentiments He certainly could not fail to see them, since it is He who implants them in us by His grace, and helps our will to adopt them. To make ourselves understood by Him, then it is not necessary to resort to formal acts, even such as are purely interior; and if we should make some in the course of our prayers it is not so much on His account as on our own, to keep our attention fixed on His presence. Our weakness often demands the assistance of these acts; but they are not the essence of prayer, and God, when He pleases, gradually lifts the soul above this need." pg. 232 "The School Of Jesus Christ" by Pere Jean Nicolas Grou, S.J. 10:16 a.m. - 2015-08-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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