It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us not what ought to be in us.

To think of our prayers as just causes would suggest that the whole importance of petitionary prayer lay in the achievement of the thing asked for. But really for our spiritual life as a whole the being taken into account or considered matters more than the being granted. Religious people dont talk about the results of prayer they talk of its being answered or heard.... We can bear to be refused but not to be ignored. In other words our faith can survive many refusals if they really are refusals and not mere disregards. The apparent stone will be bread to us if we believe that a Fathers hand put it into ours in mercy or in justice or even in rebuke.

I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of for to have been born in Gods thought and then made by God is the dearest grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.This is a prayer of contentment

Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you dont understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning--either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now.

...And in prayer this real I struggles to speak for once from his being and to address for once not the other actors but--what shall I call Him the Author for He invented us all The Producer for He controls all Or the Audience for He watches and will judge the performance The attempt is not to escape from space and time and from my creaturely situation as a subject facing objects. It is more modest to re-awaken the awareness of that situation. If that can be done there is no need to go anywhere else. This situation itself is at every moment a possible theophany. Here is the holy ground the Bush is burning now.

The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking But I never knew before. I never dreamed.... I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology It reminds me of straw.

A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.

In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.

And for all I can tell the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.