Quotes About Prayer

They bowed their heads together as Louie prayed. If God would quench their thirst, he vowed, he'd dedicate his life to him.

I am not the author of my prayers; when they come, they come from God.

Phyllis and I pray these chaplets together; at three o'clock, every first Saturday. We are never in the same town. For months, we do not speak on the phone or email. We pray these chaplets for just a few minutes, maybe as many as sixty minutes, once a month on a Saturday afternoon. Intimacy with the elusive God is that kind of intimacy. It is the closeness of praying together, apart.

Sure, sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. It repoints the person praying, taking him somewhere else.

In the words of Jewish liturgical scholar Lawrence Hoffman, 'Jews do offer freely composed prayers... But overall, it is the fixed order and content of Jewish prayer that gives it its distinctiveness and that demands the personal commitment to prayer as a discipline.

These words of prayer are among the most basic words Dr. Gatewood knows. When he has forgotten everything else, those words are the words he will have. Those words have formed his heart, and—regardless of what he feels or remembers on any particular morning—they continue to form his heart still.

When you find that God is absent, you do many things. You temporize, for a while. You buy a new prayer book, hoping that perhaps some Celtic blessings might do the trick.

And I understood that I ought not ask for a prayer language until I could ask without making it the test of my entire faith.

Augustine wrote that God sometimes does not give us what we ask in prayer. "Of His bounty, the Lord often grants not what we seek, so as to bestow something preferable.

From deep in the tradition, from The Cloud of Unknowing , a fourteenth-century text from an unnamed English monk: "You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God." The words slap. Busyness is not much of an excuse if it only takes a minute or two to move toward God. But the monk's words console, too. For, of time and person, it seems that scraps are all I have to bring forward. That my ways of coming to God these days are all scraps.

But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God.

It is a great gift when God gives me a stirring, a feeling, a something-at-all in prayer. But work is being done whether I feel it or not.

I felt, for sure, a prayer come through my grandmother's hands, a language of pulse and palm lines, and the prayer said this: May you hold her, and in holding her, hold us, forever down the line.

The blackness of night is an essential quality of the Divine Feminine. The "black cloak" of Muhammad is very famous. The Sûfîs sing about kali kamaliya vala (the one wrapped in the black blanket) in their qawwalis (spiritual songs). Muhammad's prayer rug was also black, as was the first flag of Islam.

The true Sufi cannot utter any prayer beginning with the word 'I,' for example: 'I want to know Thee better.' For to do this presupposes that there are two beings: the Sufi and Allah. This is the greatest sin. Iblis cried, 'Ana khayrun minhu! (I am better than he is!') The personal pronoun 'I' is the classic Sufi symbol for pride in its extreme form.

Sound is the secret. The great Qabbalists taught that a prayer sung is one thousand times more efficacious than a prayer simply recited. This is because a human being instantaneously goes into a state of trance when he or she begins singing, or someone starts to sing at them.

He [Crowley] realized that humanity is being asked to pray to some sky deity to be forgiven for expressing the needs of the very bodies which this deity supposedly created for humanity. In short, creation is being punished for having the very qualities it was created to have.

You acknowledge that you are both the one praying and the one being prayed to.

He passed the dead in all their ranks, in all their spectral attitudes. Some lay supine, mouths open in attitudes of near ecstasy, one upon the next, embracing. Some had bowed their heads as if in deep meditation or prayer. Others had been ground to pulp against the concrete and conveyed no expression at all.

Whether a deity is actually listening or not, there is value in formally announcing your needs, desires, worries, sins, and goals in a focused, prayerful attitude. Only when you are aware can you take action.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer." She reread the passage three times, then closed her Bible and her eyes. "Oh,

Lord," Dorothy said aloud, "I know You're with me no matter where I go, whether it's to the familiar or the new…I know it. Just help me remember what I know. Amen.

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

Repeat after me…Our Father, who art in heaven…" "Barukh atah adonai, eloheinu…" "Stop.