SOME HINTS ON PRAYER I
ST. TERESA AND ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS, the great teachers of prayer in more recent times, both of them lament, not so much that people. do not pray more, but that they do not make more advancement in prayer.
They tell us very plainly that prayer is a science as well as a practice; that if we will only go the right way about it we shall learn astonishingly both what prayer itself is, and what wonderful things it has to reveal, and that there is no one, man or woman, educated or uneducated, religious or secular, but can come to at least some knowledge, much more than most of us usually achieve.
But, alas! they add, there are few who make much advancement; few get beyond the most elementary principles; and the chief reasons are either that they wi11 not persevere, or that they fear to let themselves go forward, or that they have no one to show them the way to proceed.
Now it is not for anyone to presume to set himself up as a guide in prayer, much less as a universal guide; for prayer is an individual thing, it is the individual's intercourse with God, and God has His own way of dealing with individuals...
[Continued tomorrow]
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From The School of Love and Other Essays
by The Most Reverend Alban Goodier, S.J.
Burns, Oates, & Washburn, Ltd. 1918
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