Deep silence leads us to suspect that, in the first place, prayer is acceptance. A person who prays is one who stands with his hands open to the world. He knows that God will show himself in the nature, which surrounds him in the people he meets, in the situations he runs into. He trusts that the world holds God’s secret within it, and he expects that secret to be shown to him. Prayer creates that openness where God can give himself to man. Indeed, God wants to give himself; he wants to surrender himself to the man he has created, he even begs to be admitted into the human heart. 

This openness, however, does not simply come of itself.  It requires our confession that we are limited, dependent, weak and even sinful.  Whenever you pray, you profess that you are not God and that you wouldn’t want to be, that you haven’t reached your goal yet, and that you never will reach it in this life, that you must constantly stretch out your hands and wait again for the gift, which gives new life.

(Daily Lenten Meditations, from the works of Henri Nouwen)

I renew my resolve to make more time in my life for God.

• You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.  (Kahlil Gibran)

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Only as you pray with hope can you break through the barriers of death.  For no longer do you want to know what it will be like after you die, what heaven exactly will mean, how you will be eternal, or how the risen Lord will show himself.  You don’t let yourself be distracted by daydreams where all your conflicting desires are satisfied in a wish-come-true hereafter.  When you pray with hope, you turn yourself toward a God who will bring forth his promises; it is enough to know that he is a faithful God.  This hope gives you a new freedom, which lets you look realistically at life without feeling dejected.
(Daily Lenten Meditations, from the works of Henri Nouwen)

Lord, may I learn to pray in ever deeper hope.

Father, we pray that you fill the PMC community with Your Spirit.  Here may the strong renew their strength and seek for their working lives a noble consecration; here may the poor find help and the friendless, friendship.  May the sorrowing and bereaved find comfort and the truth that death has no dominion over their beloved.

· He prayeth best, who loveth best, all things both great and small; for the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.  (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

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 Many of us can imagine God attending to any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in.  So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of God having to fit too many things into one moment of time.

 Well, that is of course what happens to us.  Our life comes to us moment by moment.  That is what Time is like.  And of course you and I tend to take it for granted that this Time series – this arrangement of past, present and future – is not simply the way life comes to us but the way all things really exist.  We tend to assume that the whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future just as we do.  (C. S. Lewis, MERE CHRISTIANITY)

Prayer is first of all listening to God.  It’s openness.  God is always speaking; He’s always doing something.  Prayer is to enter into that activity.  Prayer in its most basic sense is entering into an attitude of saying, “Lord, what are you saying to me?” (Henri Nouwen)

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