T(r)oy's Marbles

quotes | time for everything but prayer

"Why is there so little anxiety to get time to pray? Why is there so little forethought in the laying out of time and employments so as to secure a large portion of each day for prayer?

"Why is there so much speaking, yet so little prayer? Why is there so much running to and fro, yet so little prayer? Why so much bustle and business, yet so little prayer? Why so many meetings with our fellow-men, yet so few meetings with God?

"Why so little being alone, so little thirsting of the soul for the calm, sweet hours of unbroken solitude, when God and His child hold fellowship together as if they could never part?

"It is the want of these solitary hours that not only injures our own growth in grace but makes us such unprofitable members of the church of Christ, and that renders our lives useless."

--Horatius Bonar

quotes | on hope

Since this is "The Year of Hope" for me, I have been reading a book called "The Experiment Hope" by the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. This passage struck me...

"Hoping does not mean to have a number of hopes at one's disposal. It means, rather hoping to be open. Despair does not mean to bury a few hopes here or to destroy a few illusions there, but to give up one's openness and thus oneself. To be in hope means to find oneself in a state of preparedness, not to commit oneself to what has passed by and not to tie oneself to wish-dreams, but to harmonize with the experiment which one himself is. In this sense, hope is not something which one man has and the other does not have, but is a primal mode of existing or the most important constituent of human life. Man hopes as long as he lives and, conversely, he lives in the liveliness peculiar to him as long as he hopes.

"The behavioral sciences have shown how every animal has its own kind of environment which belongs to it as the necessary externality of the internal side of its instincts. Birds need air in order to fly. Fish need water in order to swim...But man, so say some, is not bound to a definite environment. He is a world-open creature who himself can and must everywhere build his own environment in his cultures. And yet there is an element and an environment without which he cannot live as man, and that is hope. It is the breath of life."

quotes | on miracles and faith

"...in my experience miracles never bother a realist. It is not miracles that incline a realist towards faith. The true realist, if he is not a believer, will invariably find within himself the strength and the ability not to believe in miracles either, and if a miracle stands before him as an incontrovertible fact, he will sooner disbelieve his senses than admit that fact. And even if he does admit it, it will be as a fact of nature, but one that until now has been obscure to him. In the realist it is not faith that is born of miracles, but miracles of faith. Once the realist believes, his realism inexorably compels him to admit miracles too. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, said: 'My Lord and my God.' Was it the miracle that made him believe? The likeliest explanation is that it was not, and that he came to believe for the sole reason that he wanted to believe and, perhaps, in the inmost corners of his being already fully believed, even when he said: 'Except I shall see...I will not believe.'"

--from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

quotes | the need to adore

"The more man becomes man, the more will he become prey to a need, a need that is always more explicit, more subtle and more magnificent, the need to adore."

--from The Divine Milieu by Teilhard de Chardin

quotes | the best prayer

"Prayer is the cry of our hearts to God. So it must be something perfectly natural, perfectly genuine, the expression of the deepest things in our heart. It is not your lips that should speak, nor your mind, but your will. Your will manifested, spread out before your Father, true, naked, sincere, simple, and presented before Him by you. This is what prayer should be. This needs neither a long space of time nor many words, nor many thoughts. It varies: sometimes it will be longer, sometimes quite short, according as your heart's desire prompts you.

"Prayer, in the widest sense of the word, may be either a silent contemplation or one accompanied by words. The best prayer is the most loving prayer. The more it is laden with love, the more the soul holds itslef tenderly and lovingly before its God, the more acceptable is that prayer."

--Charles de Foucauld