Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already
C.S. Lewis
For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
perspective
But of course these conjectures as to why God does what He does are probably of no more value than my dog's ideas of what I am up to when I sit and read.
If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood as a object. In fact would be for them all that was not 'ant-made'.
I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything.
When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains. (..) The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure. (..) My point is that those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse. (..) I am very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that preference and encouragement which the teaches us to give them and left to their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.
power values
A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.
prayer c-s-lewis
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
essence prayer
You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'.
feeling prayer
I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.
self-knowledge prayer
prayer
For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.
In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.
prayer god-s-will
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.
pride
No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.-Til We Have Faces
regret
A simpler form of the same objection consists in saying that death ought not to be final, that there ought to be a second chance. I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given.
inspirational religious
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