prayer....................

 

     I would say yes to a prayer that reaches out over the companionable objects of our day, yes to prayers for more charity, resilience, good-naturedness, and also a listening kind of praying that is tucked somewhere always in our heart, mystically turning to ever greater reality.  What a woeful thing it would be to be denied prayer, to be numbed to its gratitude.  We can live without a great deal, but to live entirely without prayer would leave us lesser human beings.  Prayer changes our relationships with pretty much everything.  It the tribulation of night I turn the wheel of my prayer rope and steer my ship over woeful seas.  In the brightness of the longed-for dawn I stare east and am deep-rooted in the wallop of my amazement.

     In the end, prayer isn't something we do, it becomes something that we are.

-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us