The Stained Glass Buffalo: pray always

09 August 2009

pray always

Prayer is an exercise of love and it would be incorrect to think that if there is no time for solitude, there is no prayer at all. For the very reason that prayer is based especially on love and springs from it, it is possible to prolong it beyond the time devoted exclusively to it.

Though it is not possible to be always thinking of God, partly because our mind gets tired, or because our many occupations demand full attention, still it is always possible for the heart to love and to desire God, and this can, and must, exist even in the performance of duties which absorb our intellect; in fact, such an orientation can be intensified by the desire to accomplish every action for the love of God, to please him, and give him glory.

"The reason for prayer" according to St. Thomas Aquinas, "is a desire moved by charity. . . And this desire with us must be continuous, either in act, or at least potentially. . . We can say that one prays continuously by reason of the continuity of his desire".

Divine Intimacy
Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen, OCD

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It is Jesus

“It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.”
--Pope John Paul II

Carlo Carretto:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face - and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too - where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church. No, I am old enough, I know better.