The world is not divided into the strong who care and the weak who are cared for. We must each in turn care and be cared for, not just because it is good for us, but because it is the way things are.
More than anything I have learned that we are all frail people, vulnerable and wounded; it is just that some of us are more clever at concealing it than others! And of course the great joke is that it is O.K. to be frail and wounded because that is the way the almighty transcendent God made people.
Prayer, even more than eating or sleeping, is not a luxury but a necessity, and we are only fully human when we remember this and arrange our life accordingly.
What we feel at prayer is God's business, not ours, and we must strive to be totally abandoned to the presence of 'consolation' or of boredom when we pray. A clear understanding that the value of our prayer does not depend upon how we feel is extremely important if we are to persevere in prayer. So many people feel that if their prayer is distracted it cannot be pleasing to God, and are therefore led to abandon their efforts precisely when fidelity is of the most importance.
We only deliberately waste time with those we love -- it is the purest sign that we love someone if we choose to spend time idly in their presence when we could be doing something more 'constructive.
Slowly I learn the importance of powerlessness. I experience it in my own life and I live with it in my work. The secret is not to be afraid of it—not to run away. The dying know that we are not God… All they ask is that we do not desert them.
Much of our understanding of God's action in our lives in achieved in hindsight. When a particular crisis or event in our life has passed we cry out in astonishment like Jacob, 'The Lord is in this place and I never knew it.
The tension between the call to the desert and to the market place arises not from the greater presence of God in one or the other but from our varying psychological needs to apprehend him in different ways.
This conversion into prayer of our everyday joys, sorrows, hopes and desires is at first a conscious labor, but after a while it becomes second nature, so that converse with God becomes inextricably and wonderfully woven into the fabric of our lives.
It is precisely because we cannot see God that we can only know that our prayer is valid by the effect it has upon our lives, by the way we treat our neighbor.
When one is in very great pain and fear, it is extremely difficult to pray coherently, and I could only raise my mind in anguish to God and ask for strength to hold on.
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Ted Loder Author
