Some choose to pray late at night, while some early in the morning.
And some choose to keep vigil in the middle of the night. Each in a hermitage follows their grace. When we leave our beds to go to our places of prayer, we are leaving one place of rest to go to another, where we hear echo in us the words of the Lord in the Gospel, " Come to me all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest." We have to lift all up to God, all the prayer requests we have received, the needs of the church, and the world. The prayer of night has its own reality unfolding around us, and within us. Half the world is asleep in the darkness, and half-awake in the light, but largely unaware of Jesus, the true light of the world. We are standing in the middle of all this in our spoken and sung prayers. In all the secret prayers of our heart, as a bridge between a church and world often in crisis, in one prayer, above all else is offered " Whatever is done on earth today, may it be done in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." In us, all of humanity lives. When we pray, all humanity prays and turns to God. If we do not pray, the opposite happens. One hour of prayer in these live-giving hours, and all humanity can be gathered in, and lifted up to God. These life-giving prayers spread out from our hermitages to the four corners of the earth, gathering all in. It knows not the physical boundaries of the distance of miles. And so, two souls at the opposite ends of the world can be side by side. Br. Anthony-Bruno
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A complaint that we often hear from people on their journey of prayer is
that they do not feel anything; nothing seems to be happening. They think they are making no progress in their journey of prayer. People confuse all this with the supposed absence of God in their life. God is always there in the depths of the soul loving us. This is not dependent on our feelings that come and pass like the weather or the seasons. What we often feel is time wasted, or nothing going on, however, later in the journey when we look back, we are able to see the hand of God at work in those quiet hours building foundations for the next steps of our journey. This world in all its noise and rush has forgotten how to wait on God. People today are in such a hurry they do not lay the foundations, and want the roof on first. Learning to wait on God is to come to understand that everything is His unconditional gift of love, and we cannot force or manipulate things to get our own way in our time scale. Br. Anthony-Bruno |
Moderated by Brother Anthony - Bruno Archives
February 2020
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