... about prayer

More Nouwen quotes today. This time about the prayer of the heart. Back in the time not so long after the first century church there were a number of religious folk that left society to concentrate on living a pure life and writing about. That’s as simple of a definition as I can give for the Writings of the Desert Fathers. In his book, The Way of the Heart, Nouwen quotes from these writings and more recent sources in order to try and find some benefit for us from their insights. Here are some passages from the section on prayer:

We find the best formulation of the prayer of the heart in the words of the Russian mystic Theophan the Recluse: “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.” (I love that)

Thus the prayer of the heart is the prayer of truth. It unmasks the illusions about ourselves and about God and leads us into true relationship of the sinner to the merciful God. To the degree that this truth anchors itself in our heart, we will be less distracted by worldly thoughts and more single-mindedly directed toward the Lord of both our heart and the universe. Thus the words of Jesus, “Happy the pure in heart: they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8), will become real in our prayer. Temptations and struggles will remain to the end of our lives, but with a pure heart we will be restful in the midst of a restless existence.