We shouldn't pray for feelings. We should pray because it pleases God

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I think it’s a matter of depth and purity of understanding of what God actually desires.

Sure we go to Jesus, but we should do so with a pure love of Him as the saints and mystics tell us.

A pure love isn’t a self-seeking love, but instead with agape, ‘a going out of ourselves for the good of another love’ as Pope Benedict writes about.

A lot of people seem to find many more things “disturbing” these days.

From Gabrielle Bossis’s prayer journal, He and I,
  1. May 30 - Lyon. - “Is it love when my heart beats more quickly when I think of You?” “Yes, it is love. But it’s also love when you make an effort to be good for My sake without the slightest pleasurable feeling.”
 
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On what authority are you here telling others how they should pray or practice their faith?

Why do you assume the people here are ignorant and you need to correct them, even when not asked?
 
I am free to make assertions. You are free to skip them.

I will say on this point - which isn’t mine - but comes directly from the writing of many saints and some mystics - is widely accepted.

But feel free to skip them.

I could ask on what authority do you ask for my authority but I don’t want to cause you a headache.
 
I am not asking from a position of authority. I hold no authority over you. I never implied such.

I was asking because your posts have reeked of a kind moral superiority you seem to think you have over others.
 
Ask yourself calmly why your reaction is that my posts reek of moral superiority. Examine it, especially the parts that seem to injure you. There’s likely growth to be had in those spots.

Is it because you yourself tend to pray for feelings? For consolations? And you think you’re right and don’t want to consider any other possibillity, so that you have to impugn me?

Something to take to prayer.
 
Oh, I freely acknowledge that I have personal petitions in my regular prayers. That is of no concern to you. If I have an issue or a problem or a worry, i ask for God’s help, for His Mercy. I also often pray that His Will be done to close a prayer.

It was not from a position of personal injury or insecurity that I posed my query to you. I don’t need your guidance in my personal prayer. It was because I have seen you over and over again speak down to others as if they were your moral, intellectual or spiritual inferiors. I found it to be quite off putting and pompous. The fact that you assume that I am feeling “injured” because you have discerned a hidden problem in my spiritual life is an example of this.

That said, nothing further can be gained by continuing this discussion.
 
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Ed, multiple people across threads have similar reactions to your posting. Why do you think that is? How many people have to tell you to cool it with the lectures before you realize it’s not a coincidence and your tone is off?

I’m sure your heart is in the right place, but no one appointed you CAFs spiritual director-at-large.

Something to take to prayer, mi amigo.
 
Well you start by smearing me and then you defend your smearing. And then you proved my second point right, pretending to defend helpless unnamed others. Glad to see you move on.
 
As I said, no offense, but no one gave you job as protectorate. I am the OP. Feel free to move on.
 
“I am the OP. Who dares enter my realm without genuflecting to my sagacious wisdom?!”

Relax, dude. You don’t need to get your back up all the time when you get very mild criticism.
 
Edward_H said:
Shouldn’t we pray because in this moment of closer union with God, it pleases HIM?
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While that is better than praying for feelings, I still don’t think this is th highest goal yet.

Rather than pleasing God I think we should pray because… we just do because we love God.
Jesus taught us to pray in a way that expresses that intimacy with God.
Do we talk to our spouse because it pleases him/her?
Does a mother care for her child because it pleases the child?
Do we talk to our elderly because it pleases them?
Ultimately we do it out of love.
So to go even a level higher than that, the answer to why we should pray?
Why not? There is absolutely no reason why one would even think about not doing it because God loves us so much. Praying should be almost like breathing. It’s just so natural that we shouldn’t even be asking why we should do it.
No one goes around asking why should we breathe or it pleases our body to breathe.
 
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Boom Boom, quite frankly acting like an antibody muddying and clouding and suppressing any opinions unfamiliar to you or contrary to your opinion, while acting as high minded chief protectorate, isn’t a good position to be happy with.
 
Uh…huh. Well, I’ll try to be less of an antibody, then.

Look, I’m not criticizing you because I think people need to be protected. I’m criticizing you because half the time I think you have some interesting thoughts and insights that are worth hearing, but they get passed over because your tone sucks.

If you approached things as a friendly conversation between equals as opposed to a professor delivering a lecture to a particularly stupid group of students you’d probably have much more luck
 
Well praying to be one with God’s will is infinitely more important than praying for self-consolation, in my opinion.

I think there’s been a bug introduced by the secular world into the minds of too many Catholics: that feelings matter a lot. We let our intellect be co-opted by letting it overassign importance to our feelings, because they’re barking.

You can see this with statements like: “we fell out of love”.

Love is an act of the will, and it should be aimed toward the truth (which is a job of the intellect).

Feelings come, feelings go…we don’t love for feelings…we love because God deserves our purified, non-self-seeking love.

So that’s what led me to make an assertion - and I am not the first to propose this - that our prayer shouldn’t be aimed at feelings.

If God thinks we need feelings to love our wife…He’'ll give them to us…If He thinks we need to be less dependent on feelings…well He’ll test us, and help us to purify our love.
 
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Boom Boom, a half back slide isn’t necessary. I’ve learned what comments to ignore. Protectorate comments I normally ignore.
 
All our actions should be purified and rectified toward love of God. That’s my central point. Including prayer.
 
It’s not a backslide. I’m not trying to mollify you. I’m trying to give you a sense of how you come across because I genuinely think your engagements would be more fruitful if you stopped being so defensive and high-handed all the time.

But since it appears from your post you’ve decided to stick with being defensive I’ll just tell you in parting that you’re using the word “protectorate” incorrectly, oh great misunderstood genius. 😉
 
Boom Boom, Maybe some things are hard to pick up between the lines, but the importance I attach to mancini matters is a lot lower than the opposite case. You use about 4 different styles of posts, shifting around as you think needed, but you might want to solicit some feedback on the effects.
 
Fair points.

But it’s sort of a distraction to - upon seeing a topic not about personal events - insert a seriously personal topic into it.

We have a tendency to make everything about ourselves even if it utterly changes the tone and focus of the topic.

but we know that our personal events are so moving…we don’t seem to mind being the distraction.

I stand by my point that we shouldn’t pray with the main intention being our feelings, but instead our love for God, whether in that moment of unity with God He chooses to bless us with consoling feelings or instead chooses to leave us dry and wanting.

We aren’t the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.

Oh…but this will be distorted to be “cruel”. But it’s a legitimate and a mature point.

It’s as if the grieving don’t have to be other oriented. As if it’s a free pass at a fair. And that’s crazy.
 
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Doesn’t praying out of our love for God naturally leave us with some kind of good feeling? it feels good to love. Or am I misunderstanding what “good feelings” are?
 
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