Well, spiritually speaking, anyway. Unless you're doing some hardcore penances this Lent. If so, may the Holy Spirit be with you. I am not at the point where I am a Big Food Giver-Upper, although I am doing small food-related things.
Mainly I am just trying to bust through that wall of bricks otherwise known as My Thick Skull, that keeps me from being dedicated to prayer and daily mass. That and my friend Epstein-Barr, who keeps coming for tea when I haven't invited him. If I can't shake him, maybe I can just ignore him until he goes away. Or start wearing disguises.
Anyway, about prayer -- I read this passage on the blog of a friend:
We do not pray in order to improve our talents, to develop more clearly an intellectual synthesis, or widen our culture, religious or otherwise. We pray in order to tell God once again that we love him and know that he loves us, and to relate ourselves to the plan of mercy that is his.
We run still greater risks in the realm of sensibility, and in believing that our prayer has value only when we have “felt” something. The modern world takes special interest in “experiences,” descriptions, states of the soul; there is a kind of cult for everything that can yield some kind of “interior witness.” We delight in working out a projection of ourselves that arises from the senses…
Saint Paul speaks of “groanings” (Rom 8:26) or of a “cry” (Gal 4:6). What is important is not our experience but the gift we make of ourselves. We should enter into prayer, not to receive, but to give, to give ourselves and lose ourselves. And if friendship with God is to remain pre-eminent in our prayer, we must enter into prayer in order to give ourselves as a free gift, with the knowledge that we may not always really give what we are giving, and yet without being concerned about what we are giving. – Father Bernard Bro, OP
Even though that sounds hard, there is a certain relief. Thank God I don't have to feel something to know my prayers are being heard, and are reaching His ears.
As a good priest and friend often says, we don't merit more by "thinking real hard" about everything. I am guilty of going to far into my head -- not that I am an intellectual, far from it -- but I get lost on the merry-go-round of my thoughts about Him, rather than just presenting my sorry self before Him and simply saying my prayers. Well, I am practicing that this Lent. Just showing up, giving what little I have, and casting myself upon Him, because He cares for me. (1 Pet. 5:5‐7)
