Victories are won while on your knees Keep praying for those who rise up against you. Fear not. The Lord has rectified the problem. Prayer is POWERFUL

According to Benedicts scheme the community reads through... the entire book of Psalms every week. The monks are therefore exposed... to all the despairing doubtful bitter vindictive jingoistic nationalistic and seemingly racist passages in the Psalter. It is not that every sentiment expressed by a psalmist is admirable but that in praying the Psalms we confront ourselves as we really are. The Psalms are a reality check to keep prayer from becoming sentimental superficial or detached from the real world.

All during that prison time I really lived by prayer. Be in prayer always were told and back then I was.

Prayer aint weakened by distance.

Youve been the rabbi here for thirty years and these guys whove never set foot here want to decide who should be rabbi or not. And to lead prayer in Hebrew for Jews who speak Arabic they want you to write in French. So I say theyre nuts.

Aeneas mother is a starNo a goddess.I said cautiously Venus is the power that we invoke in spring in the garden when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus.He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country among pagans like me helped him understand my bewilderment. So do we he said. But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods he called her dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun from her the storm clouds flee to her the earth the skillful maker offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light...It was the Venus I had prayed to it was my prayer though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.

Prayer is an insurance policy that you can never lapse on.

In order to resist fear and discouragement it is necessary that through prayer - through a personal experience of God re-encountered recognized and loved in prayer - we taste and see how good the Lord is Psalm 34.

Jesus kept it simple. The lesson wasnt complicated. I speak you believe My word your son will be fine. We complicate what God has made simple by seeing the world through human eyes. We want to see in order to believe and presume that our limitations are His.

Spiritual work is taxing work and men are loath to do it. Praying true praying costs an outlay of serious attention and of time which flesh and blood do not relish.