If for every well-intended prayer uttered in hopes of making the world a better place there was instead a good deed accomplished the world might look as though those prayers had been answered.

I dont believe in prayer but I do believe in magic and I want to believe in miracles.

The people who know God wellmystics hermits prayerful people those who risk everything to find Godalways meet a lover not a dictator.

When you touch the celestial in your heart you will realize that the beauty of your soul is so pure so vast and so devastating that you have no option but to merge with it. You have no option but to feel the rhythm of the universe in the rhythm of your heart.

Each prayer is like a seed that gets planted in the ground. It disappears for a season but it eventually bears fruit that blesses future generations. In fact our prayers bear fruit forever.

. . . you have no idea how many people there are in the world whose day could be made and their life changed for the better if someone would just look them in the eye smile and say Hello.

That month he developed the habit every night of picking up the Bible the last thing before he went to bed and reading a few verses and from thinking a prayer and from thinking thanksgiving he advanced to the place where he boldly in the silence and serenity of the little room got down on his knees and prayed the prayer of thanksgiving. Then he followed it by the prayer of asking. He found himself asking God to take care of all the world to help everyone who needed help to put the spirit and courage into every heart to fare forth and to attempt the Great Adventure on its own behalf... Then he arose in some way fortified a trifle bigger slightly prouder more capable more of a man that he had been the day before. He had asked for help and he knew that he was receiving help and he knew that never again would he be ashamed to face any man or any body of men and tell them that he had asked for help and that help had been forthcoming and that the same experience lay in the reach of every man if he would only take the Lord at His word if he would only do what all men are so earnestly urged to do--believe.

in the name of a god who was always a ghost

I find it very difficult to talk here now because Im watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. Ive spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If its an image of anything I think its an image of our own unconscious the unconscious of our own minds... or you can put it the other way around and that is that we have a sea in us. After all we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land are we not And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover.

Prayer is in essence rebellionrebellion against the world in its fallenness. Prayer is the undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal. It is the refusal of every agenda every scheme every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God.