T
Trishie
Guest
Faith and perseverance
In prayer, Lord God, You require our faith and faithfulness. To receive, we must ask and seek and knock, while believing—offering contrite, patient, humble hearts. We know that in eternity the prayer is already known and granted in conformity with divine Love’s purposes. We believe that—however and wherever in time You choose to manifest Your answer, it shall be. Thus, through the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit, You will be glorified in us!Faith and love require a compliant act of will that is meaningless of itself as simply human action. This act of will draws force from Your life within us by Your grace. Through Your gift we thus become partakers of divine life, which is beyond mortal senses and comprehension. Its effects are often mercifully interpreted through the mind and emotions, but equally exist in pure darkness of understanding and absence of consolation.
While happiness may accompany our prayer, such emotion is not necessarily indicative of answer. Our spiritual joy and peace lie in the faith that You grant us the deepening of Your life in ourselves. This is so even where our awareness itself is untouched because You seek to wean us from things of flesh and the world.
Where we continue to depend upon material and sensory consolations, we may not on earth come to live truly in the Spirit. Thus we may die spiritually with our mortal bodies, or alternately merit a painful purgatory, instead of dying to self in this mortal life. (1982)
Although we have may difficulty in seeing divine action within ourselves, we have a God whose “strength does not lie in numbers, nor Your might in violent men, since You are God of the humble, the help of the oppressed, the support of the weak, the refuge of the forsaken, the saviour of the despairing. ” [Judith 9:14-16]