Some jottings from/prompted by Mark Gibbard's Twentieth Century Men of Prayer (SCM, 1974):

We are always beginners in the life of prayer (Thomas Merton)

God is seeking us before we are seeking him... those seeking God have already found him (Pascal)

When I cease to accept a new idea, simply because it's new, call in the undertaker (I forget who said that)

Bonhoeffer 'preached... but had not yet become a Christian' (letter 27.1.36 from Finkenwalde (Bethge p. 154f). 'Only through discipline can you learn to be free' - Bonhoeffer.

There was only a handful of people at Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's funeral. When a small boy, he was deeply moved by his mother's devotion: she used to walk 2 miles across the fields and back every day to early Mass, He owed to his mother 'le meilleur de moi meme' - the best part of himself.'

Thomas Merton used to rise at 3 am for prayer (p. 73)

'We should train ourselves - it is the task of a lifetime - to approach each event, each personal contact, expectantly, receptively, just as we approach the sacrament [cf. 'the sacrament of the present moment']. Michel Quoist: 'od is waiting for you here in this very moment, at this very place and nowhere else'.

Archbishop Anthony Bloom: 'We need to learn to speak to God without breaking the silence of intimacy by words... If we try to make worship itself out of the words we use, we will get desperately tired of those words, because unless they have the depth of silence they are shallow and tiresome' (p. 96)...

'The true self grows in iverse proportion to the growth of egoism' (Tielhard de Chardin).

For all that has been - Thanks! To all that shall be - Yes!

(Dag Hammarskjold)

'He who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either' (Bonhoeffer).

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Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher