Some Great Quotes from my Devotional Prayer

Every now and then I choose to stay at home while the family go to church. There are many different reasons why I choose this option. When I do I wonder why I don’t either do it more or make retreat a part of my working week, as I bask in it, I love it! Candles, silence, sometimes celtic music, waterfall running, prayer, reading, meditation, hearing… gold!
Here are some meditative thoughts from some dead freinds of mine –

“… many remain at the foot of the mount who could ascend to the top …. I repeat, and ask
that you always have courageous thoughts. As a result of them, the Lord will give you grace
for courageous deeds.”

“When we are quiet, not just for a few minutes but for an hour or several hours,
we may become uneasily aware of the presence within us, of a disturbing stranger,
the Self that is both ‘I’ and someone else. The Self that is not entirely welcome in his own
house because he is so different from the every day character that we have constructed.
There is a silent Self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent.”

“I do nothing. I take Merton’s advice, and do nothing.
I am just here.
Stillness, stillness ….
Everything waits, suspended in calm,
and, underneath – a profound ravishment of the senses,
of the nerves, as one [discerns]
the perceptible inner healing.
‘You wait,’ Tom said, ‘You don’t go rushing after what is already there.
You wait, give Him time, give Him time …gradually …
to reveal Himself in you.’
‘Nothing is lost. No time is wasted.
Give yourself the time
for these things to happen.’ ”

Oliver Sacks, M.D.

Prayer which is worthy of God consists in this: that one…
1) gather-in one’s mind from the entire world, and not let it be secretly bound to
anything; 2) place the mind entirely at God’s disposal; 3) forget, during the time of
prayer, everything that is material, including one’s own Self and the place where one is
standing; 4) be secretly swallowed up in the Spirit in God; 5) clothe oneself in God at the
time of prayer, both outwardly and inwardly, set on fire with ardent love for Him, and
entirely engulfed in all of Him, and entirely commingled in all of Him, with the
movements of one’s thoughts suffused with wondrous recollection of God, while the soul
has gone out in love to seek Him whom she loves, just as David said,
My soul has gone out after You (Psalms 63:9).

Philoxenus