Prayer is something that happens to you.June 11, 2018

Prayer is something that happens to you.

June 11, 2018

The following two quotes from Richard Rohr, OSM speak to me in profound ways of what it means to be contemplative in our world today and where we must go to be transforming agents in society.

Prayer is something that happens to you, much more than anything you privately do. It is allowing the Big Self more than an assertion of the small self. Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, “Prayer happened and I was there” more than “I prayed today.” All you know it that you are being led, being guided, being loved, being used, being prayed through—and you are no longer in the driver’s seat. God stops being an object of attention like any other object in the world, and becomes at some level your own “I am.” You start knowing through, with, and in Somebody Else. Your Little “I Am” becomes “We are.”

(The Naked Now, pp 102-103)

Prayer is sitting in the silence
Until it silences us
Choosing Gratitude
Until we are grateful
And praising God
Until we ourselves
Are an act of praise.

-Richard Rohr OFM

Sister Ann Winters, OSU