Listen to Life
Listen to what life is saying in the present moment before trying to shape your prayer.
"The word 'life' is meant here to encompass the complexity of events that converge on our conscious mind. From outside and from within, these events form a river of awareness, a stream of consciousness, which has been our constant experience of life since birth and possibly during the months before it. This powerful stream of awareness can be shaped and molded into human understanding only insofar as we accept it. Otherwise we move into an unreal world of our own making. This world is simply the projection of our fears and desires. It can only contain a god of our own making, a reflection of our own frightened ego. The false god of the unreal world may bear a resemblance to the living God. It may look like the Trinity or the Son of God, but it is ultimately a fraud. For the believer and especially for the Christian, the process of growth is a gradual repudiation of the unreal image of 'god' and an openness to the true and living God. This is the spiritual process observable in the writings of the Hebrew prophets and in the work of spiritual formation which Christ undertook with His disciples. They resisted the message of the reality of the Messiah. They asked Him impatiently when He would triumphantly reveal His power to Israel. They looked for an earthly, unreal Messiah and found a heavenly, real one, but only after they had lost all their illusions and were forced by events to realize that His Kingdom is not of this world."
~Benedict Groeschel
"The word 'life' is meant here to encompass the complexity of events that converge on our conscious mind. From outside and from within, these events form a river of awareness, a stream of consciousness, which has been our constant experience of life since birth and possibly during the months before it. This powerful stream of awareness can be shaped and molded into human understanding only insofar as we accept it. Otherwise we move into an unreal world of our own making. This world is simply the projection of our fears and desires. It can only contain a god of our own making, a reflection of our own frightened ego. The false god of the unreal world may bear a resemblance to the living God. It may look like the Trinity or the Son of God, but it is ultimately a fraud. For the believer and especially for the Christian, the process of growth is a gradual repudiation of the unreal image of 'god' and an openness to the true and living God. This is the spiritual process observable in the writings of the Hebrew prophets and in the work of spiritual formation which Christ undertook with His disciples. They resisted the message of the reality of the Messiah. They asked Him impatiently when He would triumphantly reveal His power to Israel. They looked for an earthly, unreal Messiah and found a heavenly, real one, but only after they had lost all their illusions and were forced by events to realize that His Kingdom is not of this world."
~Benedict Groeschel
Comments