As my prayer became more attentive and inward, I had less and less to say. I finally became completely silent... This is how it is. To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking. Prayer involves becoming silent, and being silent, and waiting until God is heard.
with all prayer (Eph. 6:18)" All sorts of prayer- public, private, mental, vocal. Do not be diligent in one kind of prayer and negligent in others... let us use all.
When the writing is going really well, whole days and weeks go by, and I suddenly realise I have all these unpaid bills and, my God, I haven't unpacked, and the suitcase has been sitting there for three weeks.
Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off.
Vocal prayer . . . must be accompanied by reflection. A prayer in which a person is not aware of Whom he is speaking to, what he is asking, who it is who is asking and of Whom, I don't call prayer-however much the lips may move.
Be faithful to the time spent in prayer and make sure that at least half of your prayer is spent in silence. This will bring you closer to Jesus. If you deepen your prayer life you will grow in holiness and obtain many graces for the souls entrusted to your care. Deepen your love for one another by praying for each other and by sharing thoughts and graces you have received in prayer and reading.
I don't know if everybody does, but I have a really hard time listening to myself on recordings, unless we've spent weeks and weeks and weeks listening and mixing.
That prayer which does not succeed in moderating our wishes--in changing the passionate desire into still submission, the anxious, tumultuous expectation into silent surrender--is no true prayer, and proves that we have not the spirit of true prayer.
Say the prayer first thing in the morning when you open your eyes; then say it again before you go to sleep. Dream the prayer. Feel the prayer with your emotional body. Be the prayer; align your faith and intent with the prayer until your whole life is based on this prayer.
I spent two weeks prancing around a studio in Queens in my underwear with nine other guys. They were long days. But what the hell, it was Calvin Klein.
Prayer did not come easily to me for I always feel that prayer is a silent things, and opening of the heart. To ask for earthly benefits, to reel out a list of requirements and expect them to be supplied is not prayer. It is putting God in the same category as an intelligent grocer.
It is only by hearsay (by word of mouth passed down from generation to generation) that whole peoples adore the God of their fathers and of their priests: authority, confidence, submission and custom with them take the place of conviction or of proofs: they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers taught them to prostrate themselves and pray: but why did their fathers fall on their knees?
They spent days, nights, weeks, and years talking, never accepting the fact that, good or bad, an idea only exists when someone tries to put it into practice.
I'd spent the whole summer working in Manchester filming Citizen Khan and then went straight into the last couple of weeks of my wife's pregnancy.
The post-war American newsroom resembled a vast factory churning out multiple editions through the night. Reporters spent days, sometimes weeks, on a single story.
What better can we do than prostrate fall before Him reverent, and there confess humbly our faults, and pardon beg with tears watering the ground?