This Sunday’s readings: Luke 11:1-4

Reflections

A coat that is not used, the moths eat; and a Christian who is hung up so that he shall not be tempted—the moths eat him; and they have poor food at that.
~ Henry Ward Beecher, 1813-1887, Congregationalist Clergyman

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
~ George Eliot, 1819-1880, Novelist/Poet

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The main temptation is not to reject God outright, but to embrace God as something secondary and use God as an instrument for our own ends.
~ Miroslav Volf

For Hannah Arendt, it was not that Adolf Eichmann did not know what he was doing… It was that he did not think about what he was doing. The thoughtlessness that allows evil to flourish cannot be dispelled with new facts or better information, and the society that has forgotten how to think needs to do more than inform its citizens. Instead, like stretching unused muscles, it must relearn the daily habits of thinking.
~ Hannah LaGrand in Thoughtlessness, Sloth, and the Call to Think

In our members there is a slumbering inclination toward desire, which is both sudden and fierce. With irresistible power, desire seizes mastery over the flesh. All at once a secret, smoldering fire is kindled. The flesh burns and is in flames. It makes no difference whether it is sexual desire, or ambition, or vanity…or greed for money… Joy in God is in course of being extinguished in us as we seek all our joy in the creature.

At this moment God is quite unreal to us, he loses all reality, and only desire for the creature is real . . . Satan does not here fill us with contempt of God, but with forgetfulness of God… The powers of clear discrimination and of decision are taken from us. The questions present themselves: “Is what the flesh desires really sin in this case?” “Is it really not permitted to me, yes—expected of me, now, here, in my particular situation, to appease desire?” […] It is here that everything within me.revolts against the Word of God. Powers of the body, the mind and the will, which were held in obedience under the discipline of the Word, of which I believed that I was the master, make it clear to me that I am by no means master of them…

This Sunday’s readings: Luke 11:5-13

Reflections

… pray as if you were to die tomorrow.
~ Benjamin Franklin

We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.
~ C.S. Lewis

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I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me. We say that we believe God to be omniscient; yet a great deal of prayer seems to consist of giving him information.
~ C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

We should not decide how to pray based on the experiences and feelings we want. Instead, we should do everything possible to behold our God as he is, and prayer will follow. The more clearly we grasp who God is, the more our prayer is shaped and determined accordingly.” “If we can’t say ‘thy will be done’ from the bottom of our hearts, we will never know any peace. We will feel compelled to try to control people and control our environment and make things the way we believe they ought to be.
~ Timothy Keller, 1950-2023, Pastor, Thinker

The best bit of advice I ever received about how to pray was this: keep it simple, keep it real, keep it up. You’ve got to keep it simple so that the most natural thing in the world doesn’t become complicated, weird and intense. You’ve got to keep it real because when life hurts like hell you’re going to be tempted to pretend you’re fine. And then at other times, when you make a mess of things, you’re going to be tempted to hide from God (which never really works) and end up hiding from yourself (which works quite well). And you’ve got to keep it up because life is tough, the battle is fierce, and God is not an algorithm. The journey of faith demands a certain bloody-mindedness of us all, not least in the realm of prayer.
~ Pete Greig, How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.
~ Martin Luther