When I was a little kid, I used to think that if you needed to read a prayer than you must not really know how to talk to God on your own. I was stupid.
Today I find it powerful to read a prayer in unison. I love to read other people's prayers because they say what I may be thinking but have not been able to express. One of my favorite prayer books is Hearts on Fire, Praying with the Jesuits. It's a companion book of prayer that goes along with St. Ignatius' spiritual exercises.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability ---
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually -- let them grow.
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (Hearts on Fire, Praying with Jesuits, page 102)
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