The School of Love, February 24

SOME HINTS ON PRAYER, Part I

[continued from yesterday]

...Not always time! And yet the old woman was lying there all day long and every day, often with no one to visit her for hours together!

"Why, what do you do with your time?" the lady naturally asked.

" Well, Madame," said the poor victim; "when I first broke my thigh and was told I should never rise from my bed again, I just thought I would give myself to my prayers. So I arranged some prayers that I would say every day, and some I would say at intervals; and to make them go better I would say them very slowly. But soon the 'Our Father' began to grow and grow, until now it some­times takes me the whole week to get through it. Oh, Madame, if people only knew what was in the 'Our Father'!"

And here the poor, uneducated old woman broke into an exposition of the prayer, the nature of the Fatherhood of God and His attitude to us His children, such, as the lady herself told me, as might have come from the lips of the most highly trained saint and theologian.

And perhaps they did; but from a saint and theologian trained in God's own school, the school of prayer combined with welcome suffering. Which, incidentally, reminds us of two other truths: first, that suffering is not wholly evil, however much we may fear it; and second, that prayer and suffering are seldom far removed, but that both give strength, and depth, and fruitfulness to one another.

[Tomorrow begins "Some Hints on Prayer, Part II]
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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