Evelyn Underhill on Prayer

"In the first place, what do we mean by Prayer? Surely just this: the part of our conscious life which is deliberately oriented towards, and exclusively responds to spiritual reality. God is that spiritual reality, and we believe God to be immanent in all things: He is not far from each one of us: for in him we live and move and have our being."

'Prayer' says Walter Hilton, 'is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God by withdrawing it from earthly thoughts." It is ascent says Ruysbroeck, of the Ladder of Love. In the same spirit William Law defines prayer as the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time into the riches of eternity.

It entails, then a going up or out from our ordinary cirlce of earthly interests. Prayer stretches out the tentacles of our consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life which is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world of things; but rather to that 'Eternal turth, ture Love and loved Eternity' wherein the world is felt to be enshrined. 

The whole of a person's life consists in a series of balanced responses to this Transcendent-Immanent Reality. Because we live under two orders, we are at once a citizen of Eternity and of Time. "

Dallas Willard on Transforming the Will

Augustine on Youthful Lust and Marriage

I really enjoyed these thoughts by Augustine from the confessions on youthful lust and marriage. I am blessed to have "found the shore of marriage".

"I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind- the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and plunged me into a gulf of infamy....I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications...If only there had been some one to regulate my disorder and turn to my profit the fleeting beauties of the things around me, and to fix a bound to their sweetness, so that the tides of my youth might have spent themselves upon the shore of marriage! Then they might have been tranquilized and satisfied with having children, as they law prescribes, O Lord..."

I love the contrast between the "hot imagination of puberty" and the solid real shores of marriage! I read this from a book called "Readings in Christian Thought" by Hugh T, Kerr. It compiles snippets of writings from throughout church history, and I believe this one is compiled from both the confessions and "enchiridion". The ending paragraph is also worth quoting...a biting revelation of the disgustingness of sin:

"Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart- which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error- not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself."

Alleluia the song of the desert; Merton on the dread and awe of the christian life

"The climate in which monastic prayer flowers is that of the desert, where the comfort of man is absent, where the secure routines of man's city offer no support, and where prayer must be sustained by God in the purity of faith. Even though he may live in a community, the monk is bound to explore the inner waste of his own being as a solitary. The word of God which is his comfort is also his distress. The liturgy, which is his joy and which reveals to him the glory of God, cannot fill a heart that has not previously been humbled and emptied by dread. Alleluia is the song of the desert

The christian is never merely an isolated individual. He is a member of the praising community, the people of God. Alleluia is the vicotrious acclamation of the Risen Saviour. Yet the people of God itself, while celebrating the praise of the Lord in a tabernale of beuty overshadowed by the Bright Cloud of his presence, is still on a pilgramage. We acclaim God as members of a community that has been blessed and saved and is traveling to meet him as he comes in his promised Advent. Yet as individuals we know ourselves to be sinners. The prayer of the monk is dictated by this twofold consciousness of sin and redemption, wrath and mercy- as is the prayer of every christian."

-Thomas Merton
from "Contemplative Prayer"