Quotes About Prayer

How can you sing of Amazing Grace? How can you sing prayerfully of heaven and earth and all God's wonders without using your hands?

Intimacy with GOD is most exhilarating, most amazing, most exciting and most rewarding of all.

It is blasphemy if you pray before God while you are full of anger.

I find that if I pray for the people I'm most angry with, my anger turns into something more redemptive.

When I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.

Be thankful and repay Growth with good work and care. Work done in gratitude Kindly, and well, is prayer.

Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, 'Thy will be done,' and then again I am free and can go to sleep.

This, I thought, is what is meant by "thy will be done" in the Lord's Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God's will may not be the same. It means there's a good possibility that you won't get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified.

And so how was a human to pray? I didn't know, and yet I prayed. I prayed the terrible prayer: "Thy will be done." Having so prayed, I prayed for strength. That seemed reasonable and right enough. As did praying for forgiveness and the grace to forgive. I prayed unreasonably, foolishly, hopelessly, that everybody in Port William might be blessed and happy—the ones I loved and the ones I did not. I prayed my gratitude

Those who will not learn in plenty to keep their place must learn it by their need when they have had their way and the fields spurn their seed. We have failed Thy grace. Lord, I flinch and pray, send Thy necessity. We Who Prayed and Wept, p. 211.

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

And so how was a human to pray? I didn't know, and yet I prayed. I prayed the terrible prayer: "Thy will be done." Having so prayed, I prayed for strength. That seemed reasonable and right enough. As did praying for forgiveness and the grace to forgive. I prayed unreasonably, foolishly, hopelessly, that everybody in Port William might be blessed and happy—the ones I loved and the ones I did not. I prayed my gratitude. The

After you have said "thy will be done," what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray "thy will be done" after you see what it means?

The Wild Geese (excerpt) Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

Oh Lord, make us able To eat all that's on this table, And if there's some we haven't got Bring it to us while it's hot

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. — Wendell Berry, from "How To Be a Poet," Given . (Counterpoint March 1, 2006) Originally published 2005.

The dark Again has prayed the light to come Down into it, to animate And move it in its heaviness. So what was still and dark wakes up, Becomes intelligent, moves, names Itself by hunger and by kind...

I learned that what men believe about the gods is mostly their own wishful imaginings. The idea that a man can bend the immortals to his will with prayer and sacrifice or pious confession is ludicrous. The immortals do only what suits them best, and that is care for their own power and pleasure.

Sometimes it is best for men not to attempt to interfere with destiny. Our prayers can be answered in ways which we do not expect and do not welcome. ••• I

I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day.

If tribal thinking is original sin, then story is prayer. At its best, it reminds us that, beneath our many differences, we remain beasts of one species.

Prayer? I asked. Of course. If you're not connected to the source of all knowledge, you're no better than a telephone when one of these lines is down. He gestured with his stick at the wires above our heads.

Up to then, neither Mother nor Pop had any immediate church connections, but used to meet with a few others at spiritualistic seances, sometimes at home, sometimes elsewhere around the block. A prime mover in this form of religious service was old man Demarest, a devout believer. The chief tenet of these earnest persons was that the dead did live as spirits about us and would come or could be called to us at certain times by prayer or otherwise. There were curious consequences.