Wednesday, 30 May 2018

TM6107 Viva

Prayer

- William Fitzgerald, Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance

- Because human attention, the “engine” of prayer, inevitably wanes,

moments for human and divine commerce opened by prayer continually
resolve into ordinary time.

- Karl Rahner: experience of need opens one to prayer, and prayer becomes
an experience of blessing. Discovering prayer is equivalent to discovering
our real situation in the world. Rahner’s placement of critical need and blessed
opportunity into dynamic relation, where prayer is both a critical response to an
exigence and a creative act that leads to discovery of our real situation,
echoes Consigny’s insight of rhetoric as a site of negotiation between situations
and tools.

- Rowen Williams, Being Christian

- Jesus speaks to God for us, but we speak to God in him. You may say what you
want — but he is speaking to the Father, gazing into the depths of the Father’s
love. And as you understand Jesus better, as you grow up a little in your faith,
then what you want to say gradually shifts a bit more into alignment with what he
is always saying to the Father, in his eternal love for the eternal love out of which
his own life streams forth.

- That, in a nutshell, is prayer — letting Jesus pray in you, and beginning that
lengthy and often very tough process by which our selfish thoughts and
ideals and hopes are gradually aligned with his eternal action; just as, in his
own earthy life, his human fears and hopes and desires and emotions are
put into the context of his love for the Father, woven into his eternal relation
with the Father — even in that moment of supreme pain and mental agony
that he endures the night before his death.

- The Lord’s Prayer begins with a vision of a world that is transparent to God: ‘May
your kingdom come, your will be done; may what you (God) want shine through in
this world and shape the kind of world it is going to be.’

- Now, for Gregory (of Nyssa), as for Origen, one of the most crucial aspects
of prayer is to understand it as a constant growth, a constant movement into
an endless mystery. He says in his book on the life of Moses that the only
definition of life with God is that it has no definition in the sense of having a

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boundary around it. You keep on moving. There is always more to discover. And
so just as Moses goes up into the darkness on top of Mount Sinai to meet
God, so our journey out of Egypt, through the desert, up the mountain, is a
journey into darkness where our ideas about God tend to fall away. And yet
it is in the depths of darkness — recognising we shall never master or
understand what God is like — that enlightenment comes.


- Romans 8:26

26 In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we
ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.

- Hebrews 7:25

25 Therefore he is able to save completely[a] those who come to God through
him, because he always lives to intercede for them.


- Mark 15:34

34 And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema
sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

Matthew 27:46

46 About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli,[a] lema
sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

- Matthew 27:51-54

51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.
The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open. The bodies of
many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53 They came out of the
tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and[e] went into the holy city and appeared to
many people. 54 When the centurion and those with him who were guarding
Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and
exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”

- Hebrews 12:25-27

25 See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks. If they did not escape when
they refused him who warned them on earth, how much less will we, if we turn
away from him who warns us from heaven? 26 At that time his voice shook the
earth, but now he has promised, “Once more I will shake not only the earth
but also the heavens.”[Haggai 2:6] 27 The words “once more” indicate the removing
of what can be shaken—that is, created things—so that what cannot be shaken
may remain.