Our praying itself is as much a gift as is the answer to it. And prayer is not just God's gift in the way that our power of speech or our health is God's gift; prayer is God's grace, and that means it is due to God's own life within us, God's own spirit within us.
When we pray, we display a divine power which is in us because we are in Christ, sharing his life. We speak to the Father with the voice of his Son because we have been taken up to share in their Spirit. ...
Now this is an astonishing teaching: every bringing of our desires before our Father in heaven is Christ in us speaking to his Father and ours. ...
You must indeed pray for the right things; but the right things are not the noble high-minded things that you think you ought to want, they are the vulgar and rather infantile things you really do want. Genuine prayer is honest prayer, laying before your Father in heaven the actual desires of your heart - never mind how childish they may sound. Your Father knows how to cope with that. ...
...If you will be honest in prayer, acknowledging that you are not very altruistic, that you do worry about your own interests, if you will just try to be, and admit to being, as you are, the Holy Spirit, I promise you, will lead you into a deeper understanding of who you are and what you really want. ...We all start as children and we all need time to grow up. It is no good pretending that we are already there. If you treat a 5-year-old as an adult she will never be allowed to grow into a real adult. –God, Christ and Us; Herbert McCabe OP
I believe Fr. McCabe has hit a few nails on their heads here. I think it's very important that he has reminded us that our prayer is a gift. We wouldn't even be wanting to pray in any way if God's Grace in us had not first given us Himself in that way. People don't just get up the gumption to pray out of their raw, untransformed guts. Prayer, communication with God, this sacred interchange, is a great gift, one we have because we have been taken up into the mystical Life of Christ Himself, because we have been inhabited by His Holy Spirit. So, even when the words we speak in prayer are not perfect because we are not perfect, they are still being spoken out of our union with Him, because we are in Him, and that is an amazing thing.
Being honest in prayer - what a concept. Many of us probably spend a good amount of time not doing this, feeling guilty about how we really feel and would like to pray, and praying about something we think we should pray about. OK, I'm not sure there's anything horrible about praying for things we know are needed or right, but with what motive? To make sure God knows we really are unselfish and then His Eye will twinkle with gladness when He looks at us? I hope not. If so, please stop it and start praying for the FJ Cruiser you really want and let Him deal with you where you actually are instead of having to get down through layers of bull crap to get to the child beneath. Just be the child. He loves children. Children who are children have a good chance of growing up right. Children who think they are, or who act like, adults already, put their parents in a serious bind. The things you could teach a child, they cannot learn. It's time, then, to be who and where we are I reckon. We might actually grow up one day.
"Then, if we cannot as yet think alike in all things, at least we may love alike. Herein we cannot possibly do amiss." John Wesley
"Keep your eyes on the crucifix, for Jesus without the cross
is a man without a mission, and the cross without Jesus
is a burden without a reliever." Fulton J. Sheen
"...I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be
completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen
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