Spirituality
Daily Prayer Online
PRAYER
Prayer does not have to be an attempt to get God's attention, not an action we perform on God all the time, but the action God desires to perform in us to bring us to life. And when people are faced with deep anxieties about their prayer life, it can at times be of the greatest importance to say to them 'prayer is also letting God be God'. And if you're feeling that you're exhausting yourself with the endless effort to concentrate properly, to get from here to there (wherever there is) you may very well need to hear the good news that prayer is also God being God in you, if you let him. It's not simple, or without hard work because letting God be God in you requires you to do a fair amount of spring-cleaning en route. But that's perhaps for another day. The Good News is that prayer is given to us as well as achieved, that prayer is not something we squeeze out with effort, but something that happens when we let God be God. A fine phrase of one Roman Catholic writer is: 'prayer is the mist that God sucks out of our marsh'. But that's perhaps a little negative: I prefer to think of the breathing in and breathing out of the body in prayer as the visible, sacramental image of the Holy Spirit speaking in Christ to the Father – in us.Archbishop Rowan Williams : from : Risen Indeed; Risen Today : Lecture to Clergy and Laity of Winchester Diocese, February 2008