More Things Are Wrought By Prayer

There are those scoffers and diminishers of prayer. A scoffer would say it doesn't work, and a diminisher tells you, "all I can do is pray" (betraying a very wrong view of prayer!).  Good true prayer "works"-- the scoffers have no studies to tell them that it does - or does not (which is what they claim they want); diminishers don't seem to realize that prayer is 1) the best and first thing to do for the person 2) gives light/guidance for action.
Lacking prayer, what are we doing but "nourishing a blind life within the brain..."?

"More Things Are Wrought By Prayer"

More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of.
Wherefore let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats,
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer,
Both for themselves and those who call them friend.
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
—by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Compassion Universal

Christ Has No Body

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

• Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

"Loving the Unlovable"

I live in a city of “perfect people” and they’re crazy lonely. Why? I suspect it’s because they don’t understand that most people don’t cozy up to perfect people. I’ve noticed that ‘perfect’ people are about the most difficult people be comfortable with. And the Perfect people, living on the hamster wheel of perfectionism, think they’re just not perfect enough to be loved.
Truth: most people would rather be around silly and slightly sloppy - as long as they’re kind.
**So, go kiss a puppy, then have a cigarrette.**

What Lies Ahead?

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him... (The Bible, I John 3:2)
-------------------------------------------------------
Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows ups seeing nothing but dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses hope of deliverance she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities and waves on the beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole, he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. “But,” she gasps, “you didn’t think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?” “What?” says the boy. “No pencil marks there?” And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition-the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the coloured three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve.
The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.
So with us. “We know now what we shall be’” but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape; not as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.

• C.S. Lewis in “Transposition”

Why Bother to Praise? What's That About?

“When I first began to draw near to belief in God…I found a stumbling block in the demand… made by all religious peple that we should “praise” God; still more in the suggestion that God Himself demanded it.
We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity, who gratify that demand. Thus, a picture, ludicrous and horrible, both of God and His worshippers, began to appear in my mind. The Psalms were especially troublesome this way, “Praise the Lord,” “O praise the Lord with me,” “Praise Him.” (why…did praising God so often consist of telling others to praise Him?)
…Worse still was putting the statement into God’s own mouth, “whoso offers me thanks and praise, he honors me.” [Psalm 50:23] …
And mere quantity of praise seemed to count “seven times a day do I praise Thee.” (Psalm 119:164). It was extremely distressing. It made one think what one least wanted to think.
Gratitude to Him, reverence to Him, obedience to Him, I thought I could understand; [but] not this perpetual eulogy. Nor were matters mended by a modern author who talked of God’s “right” to be praised. I…think “right” is a bad way of expressing it…but…I see what the author meant. …[Let’s] begin with inanimate objects which can have no rights. What do we mean when we say a picture is “admirable”? ..The sense in which the picture “deserves” or “demands” admiration is that…admiration is the correct, adequate or appropriate response to it…and that if we do not admire it, we shall be stupid, insensible and great losers, we shall have missed something.
But the most obvious fact about praise-whether of God or anything-strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or giving of honour. I never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.
The world rings with praise-lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game—praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, cars, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, even sometimes politicians or scholars.
I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read. The healthy and unaffected man, even if luxuriously brought up and widely experienced in good cookery, could praise a very modest meal: the dyspeptic and the snob found fault with all.
Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible. Nor does it cease to be so when, through lack of skill, the forms of its expression are very uncouth or even ridiculous…
I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?” The Psalmists in telling men to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.
My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what we indeed can’t help doing, about everything else we value.
I think we delight to praise [in general] what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.
It is not out of compliment that lovers keep telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete until it is expressed.
[to be continued]

• CS Lewis Reflections on the Psalms