Prayer by Karl Rahner – To be an ‘inward’ person
I must live out the daily drudge and the day that is yours as one reality. As I turn outward to the world, I must turn inward toward you, and possess you, the only One, in everything. But how does my daily drudge become the day that is yours? My God, only through you. Only through you can I be an ‘inward’ person.
Karl Rahner – The Mystical Way in Everyday Life
Karl Rahner’s thoughts on a theology of sleeping, which includes prayer, letting go, and dreaming.
We sleep away a good third of our lives. Hence, sleep belongs very much to our everyday life. Sleep is an act of trusting one’s deepest inner conviction, one’s own certainty, and the goodness of the human world.
Prayer by Karl Rahner
O Lord God, I don’t wonder that my prayers fall so short of you – even I myself often fail to pay the least attention to what I’m praying about. So often I consder my prayer as just a job I have to do, a duty to be performed.
Prayer by Karl Rahner
I should like to speak with you, my God, yet what else can I speak of but you?
Could anything exist unless present with you eternally, finding its true home and most intimate explanation
in your mind and heart?
Prayer by Karl Rahner – Prayer for hope
We ask you, God of grace and eternal life, to increase and strengthen hope in us. Give us this virtue of the strong, this power of the confident, this courage of the unshakable. Make us always have a longing for you, the infinite plenitude of being.
Prayer by Karl Rahner – Incarnation
O God, whenever I think of Your Infinity, I am racked with anxiety, wondering how You are disposed to me. You must adapt Your word to my smallness, so that it can enter into this tiny dwelling of my finiteness—the only dwelling in which I can live—without destroying it.
Prayer by Karl Rahner – God of My Vocation
Can people really recognize You in me? Or can they at least grasp the fact that You have sent me as the ambassador of Your truth, the bearer of Your mercy? When this question occurs to me, it seems that Your Gospel of joy and for my brethren is to me, the messenger, only a crushing burden.
Prayer by Karl Rahner – Hallowing of My Acts
You breathe on my attempts to be a person of kindness.
You touch my soiled efforts to reach out in forgiveness.
You hold carefully my desire to offer comfort and care.
Prayer by Karl Rahner – Homecoming to You
Before You, all multiplicity becomes one; in You, all that has been scattered is reunited; in Your Love all that has been merely external is made again true and genuine.
Prayer by Karl Rahner – Both everyday and Your day
I must learn to have both “everyday” and Your day in the same exercise. In devoting myself to the works of the world, I must learn to give myself to You, to possess You, the One and Only Thing, in everything. But how? Only through You, O God.
Prayer by Karl Rahner – God comes to us continually
God comes to us continually, both directly and indirectly. He demands of us both work and pleasure, and wills that each should not be hindered, but rather strengthened, by the other. Thus the interior man possesses his life in both these ways, in activity and in rest
Prayer by Karl Rahner – Finding You in everything
If You have given me no single place to which I can flee and be sure of finding You, if anything I do can mean the loss of You, then I must be able to find You in every place, in each and every thing I do. Otherwise I couldn’t find You at all, and this cannot be since I can’t possibly exist without You.
Prayer by Karl Rahner – Pleasures and disappointments
Is a tired and disillusioned heart any closer to You than a young and happy one? Where can we ever hope to find You, if neither our simple joys nor ordinary sorrows succeed in revealing You to us?
Prayer by Karl Rahner – The Path to You
I now see clearly that, if there is any path at all on which I can approach You, it must lead through the very middle of my ordinary daily life. If I should try to flee to You by any other way, I’d actually be leaving myself behind, and that, aside from being quite impossible, would accomplish nothing at all.
Prayer by Karl Rahner – What would lift me?
Even if I should try to escape from my routine by becoming a Carthusian, so that I’d have nothing more to do but spend my days in silent adoration of Your holy presence, would that solve my problem? Would that really lift me out of my rut?
Prayer by Karl Rahner – Escaping from my exile
How can I turn myself toward the one thing necessary, toward You? How can I escape from the prison of this routine? Haven’t You Yourself committed me to it? And didn’t I find myself already in exile, from the very first moment I began to realize that my true life must be directed toward You?
Prayer by Karl Rahner – What final yield?
And what will I myself be at that hour, when I am only myself and nothing else? But when the heavy weight of death one day presses down upon my life and squeezes the true and lasting content out of all those many days and long years, what will be the final yield?
Prayer by Karl Rahner – The warehouse of my soul
My soul has become a huge warehouse where day after day the trucks unload their crates without any plan or discrimination, to be piled helterskelter in every available corner and cranny, until it is crammed full from top to bottom with the trite, the commonplace, the insignificant, the routine.
LENT with Gregory of Narek (3)
Prayer 2 – Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart.
Will you, I wonder:
Forget to be charitable, my expectation?
Neglect to be compassionate, caring Lord?
Regret your charity toward humankind, constant Lord?
LENT with Gregory of Narek (2)
Prayer 2 – Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart.
Grant me life, compassionate Lord.
Hear me, merciful Lord.
Be charitable to me, forgiving Lord.
Save me, long-suffering Lord.
Protect me, defender Lord.
Be generous, all-giving Lord.
Free me, all-powerful Lord.
Revive me, restoring Lord.
Raise me again, awe-inspiring Lord.
Enlighten me, heavenly Lord.
Cure me, omnipotent Lord.
Grant pardon, inscrutable Lord.
Bestow gifts, bountiful Lord.
Adorn me with grace, generous Lord.
Let us be reconciled, healing Lord.
Be accepting, unvengeful Lord.
Prayer by Karl Rahner – God of my daily routine
When it stands before You and Your infallible Truthfulness, doesn’t my soul look just like a market place where the second-hand dealers from all comers of the globe have assembled to sell the shabby riches of this world? Isn’t it just like a noisy bazaar, where I and the rest of mankind display our cheap trinkets to the restless, milling crowds?
Prayer as Seeking God’s Guidance
In Scripture, we see many examples of people who seek out God’s guidance in prayer, especially so when they are alone and afraid as they stand before some major upheaval or impending suffering in their lives.
A Crisis of Imagination
Imagine yourself lying in bed some night having just had a very good time of prayer. You are flooded with strong, clear feelings and images about God. On that particular evening you have no faith doubts – you can feel the existence of God.
Affective Prayer
“You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime – perhaps not today, but sometime – you are able to hear God say to you: ‘I love you!’…
OGF 10/2018 “The omnipotence of prayer is our strength”
Unique, amazing, overwhelming. And let’s admit it straight away: off-the-pegs clothes didn’t suit him. Pointless to get involved in cutting and sewing… he’d have suffocated in them. He was as he was. That’s how he was made. Every size was too tight on him. And there was nothing to do if the pattern didn’t fit.
Book of Exodus (2) Enriching Cries
The first prayer that we find in the Bible is a cry, a cry that rises into the sky by an oppressed people. To have an experience of liberation one must first feel the need to be liberated, and then cry, believing or hoping that there, or up there, is someone to pick up the cry
Google takes you to the mosque!
Need prayer? Google takes you to the nearest mosque! Need prayer in Rome? No problem! Google takes you to the nearest mosque or Muslim Center straight way! Try it! Google … Continua a leggere
Fr. Cantalamessa, Lent Homilies 2014
Father Cantalamessa’s 5th Lent Homily 2014 St. Gregory the Great: The Spiritual Understanding of the Scriptures In our attempt to place ourselves under the teaching of the Fathers to give a … Continua a leggere
OGF 9/2013 – Interview with Pope
OGF 9/2013 – Interview with Pope Francis (extracts) I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life Interview with Pope Francis Extracts fom the interview with Pope Francis … Continua a leggere