CONTRA FATUM

Yet one of those blog-posts that are "to be updated" as  I find more quotes on the subject matter. There is a tendency to think of prayer as a mechanism of obtaining things. You ask, you receive. God is imagined to be some sort of cosmic mechanical dispenser. You put in prayer, you get something, whatever, out. Of course it has to be honest prayer from a pure heart, and so on. We also tend to think of prayer as an initiative we take in order to get God's attention. But what we forget is that the only prayer acceptable to God is the one animated by the Spirit.

"If anyone has a thought of God, it does not match God's worth - what could that be? So far as in him lies, let him think of a tremendous light of supreme beauty, unthinkable and unapproachable, possessing every good power and every attractive virtue, concerned for all, full of compassion, passionless, good, omniscient, completely prescient, true, sweet, brilliant, unquenchable" (Clement, Selections from the Prophetic Scriptures, 21, Ferguson, 161-162)

What is called by men an ancestral custom passes away in a moment, but the divine guidance is a possession which abides for ever. (The Instructor VII, ANF p. 223)