[DOWNLOAD] "Prayer and Identity (Transcript of a Taped Conference) (Commentary) (Report)" by Cross Currents # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Prayer and Identity (Transcript of a Taped Conference) (Commentary) (Report)
- Author : Cross Currents
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 70 KB
Description
A few things on the life of prayer ... Do we know why we want to live lives of prayer? Are we praying in such a way that our prayer is simply for "something else"? It's all very well to pray for intentions, and to pray for the world, and to pray for health and all those things; still, a life of prayer tends to be an end in itself. It is right for prayer to be an end in itself insofar as it is entirely centered on God, who is our end, if we can still use those terms--I suppose people still believe that God is our end, in the sense of the goal toward which we orient all our lives, or should orient all our lives. As religious we still think of our religious life as a life given to God, consecrated to God, oriented to God; and it is in prayer that we are most dedicated, consecrated, and oriented to God. In prayer everything in us is, so to speak, centered on God. It is in prayer that we are most ourselves, that we are most what we want to be, what we hope to be, what we are called to be. But this can easily become very confused, especially if we have some sort of implicit, confused ideas about what our prayer is all about, or what God is all about, and what kind of a thing the religious life is all about. When we are mixed up on these points everything tends to get mixed up, and prayer can become a very mixed-up and frustrating thing when it should be quite simple.