Empowered to Pray by Henri Nouwen

Prayer is the gift of the Spirit. Often we wonder how to pray, when to pray, and what to pray. We can become very concerned about methods and techniques of prayer. But finally it is not we who pray but the Spirit who prays in us.

Paul says: “The Spirit … comes to help us in our weakness, for, when we do not know how to pray properly, then the Spirit personally makes our petitions for us in groans that cannot be put into words; and he who can see into all hearts knows what the Spirit means because the prayers that the Spirit makes for God’s holy people are always in accordance with the mind of God” (Romans 8:26-27). These words explain why the Spirit is called “the Consoler.”

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Quote From Thomas Merton

“Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into a prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.”

Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1958): 94

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Prayer At the Open Window

In the solitude, I ponder life’s meaning.
I have looked but not really seen.
Because a window is open

does not mean the air is full of light.
Perhaps, I have played too many games—
evenings and mornings,

drinking in foolishness with my coffee—
and failed to heed a lesson given. Or,
perhaps, I barely listened. But I’m

asking now. There is so much to ponder,
as I gaze upon the tree line,
where just last week another doe came

bolting through the yard. At first,
I thought it was a dog. But no dog leaps
with such magnificence. No, not even

the greyhound. I know that. I see that.
So why not the rest? If there’s really
an answer for every question,

no mystery behind heaven’s gate, then I have
argued and lost. Surely, something
hides in the darkness like a shadow in the fog.

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Then I Wander

Then I wander into the nearby woods,
where a bird sings a plaintive song from his heart,
and just as the sun plays a game of charades
with the cirrus clouds in the quickly darkening sky,
I spot a log in the water, felled, perhaps,
by the congregated beavers. A frog at the edge of the brook
is croaking, but the brook gurgles somewhat louder than the frog.
The brook flows over the rocks into the shade under the willow.
The sky is angry, ’though it won the game. And I have forgotten
the lesson of the garden: The story told by flowers.

first published in Flutter Poetry Journal

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emphasis mine