"I met a priest who must have been about thirty. Something about him struck me - he had love to spare for everyone and his love wasn't conditional by whether we were good and it never changed when we were bad." Anthony Bloom

This is certainly a challenge for each of us in today's world. And might I add also here on the blogstream from time to time. Are you willing; am I willing to let it truly speak into the core of our spirit and allow God to infuse this knd of love in us to share freely so we can be 'God with skin on' where we are today? June

"Very often we are inattentive in prayer, our heart is not in it, and our prayer is not upheld by our life.'

"The first thing, then, is really to find words of prayer that are worthy of you and worthy of God. I say, 'worthy of you and worthy of God' because if they are good enough for you, then God can accept them, but if they are not good enough for you, leave God alone."
Anthony Bloom in Beginning to Pray

IN this second statement about the last phrase I think it reflects one's feelings at times - we think that our prayer is not good enough so feel God would not care or would not want to listen - so we do not validate it. Think of it this way - how would you talk to your best friend about what you want to pray about? And then realize that God really is the best friend you or I can have.

June

"We have no right to complain of the absence of God, because we are a great deal more absent than He ever is." Anthony Bloom

Where would an earthly relationship be if we acted towards another person like we act towards God?

June

Anthony Bloom quoting his father:
"Always remember that whether you are alive or dead matters nothing. What matters is what you live for and what you are prepared to die for."
Anthony Bloom in Beginning to Pray

Are we not more worried about living or dying than what we are living for and prepared to die for? It makes me stop and think - what and who am I willing to die for - and is it really the right choice? Or is there really a right choice?
JUNE

This is going to be lengthy but the whole is needed for proper perspective.

"We all need the wisdom that derives from those who posess a worldview a little less limited than our own, but young people, who do not have the advantage of wide experience of life in the present, perhaps require this wisdom more than most. The question is: What should we tell them? We live in a time when there is palpable crisis of confidence among many adults as to what to say to their children. Having lost hold on God, the culture has by degrees lost hold of any larger story that make sense of our individual and group stories and that provides us with shared codes of ethics and with role models who enact them.

This loss of narrative and direction makes life difficult enough for adults who have experienced it and who no longer know where they are heading or why, but it makes the task of instructing those younger people whoaccompany us on the journey particularly difficult. There is a justifiable antipathy to the older, authoritarian "Do as I say, not as I do," approach to parenting, for which young people have little respect in any case, but this leads in practice simply to saying less and less - and having less and less conviction about it. Parenting becomes by degrees a matter of the blind leading the blind and is often simply delegated to those proffessionals who are thought to know something that we do not - schoolteachers, doctors, psychologists - or to those willing amateurs, like sports coaches,who seem to get on well with children. The delegation of parenting to the TV is not unknown, for the TV speaks with authority and has role models in abundance. "Who are we to tell our children how to live," we cry, "when we have made such a mess of our world and our lives?" And in our lostness, we become more interested in their approval of us and their friendship with us that in being an adult-in-relation-to-a-child at all. We may even look to them for the wisdom that we lack, for they seem to know so much and be so confident about it." Iain Provan

Interaction here is welcome - but I really think this is a provocative thought in light of the teen problems in our American culture - there is more too but I will save that.
June