Remembering the facts of death and Heaven gives us an even more pressing reason to learn to pray: We do not have an infinite amount of time. We are one day nearer Home today than we ever were before. I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.'
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of prayer in the context of our mortality and the afterlife.
Peter Kreeft's quote reminds us that life is finite and the time we have should be cherished, especially when it comes to spiritual practices like prayer. He argues that prioritizing time for prayer over trivial pursuits, such as watching television, is essential because we will not regret investing in our spiritual connection when we face our own death.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of spirituality in daily life, this quote can remind the audience to focus on what truly matters.
Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. [...] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.
Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.
Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.
One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.
Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.
You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.
He appeared before me and departed. We were not able to speak to or touch each other. But in that short interval, he transformed many things inside me. He literally stirred my mind and body the way a spoon stirs a cup of cocoa, down to the depths of my internal organs and my womb.
You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; may be you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it.
It is time that Christians were judged more by their likeness to Christ than their notions of Christ. Were this sentiment generally admitted we should not see such tenacious adherence to what men deem the opinions and doctrines of Christ while at the same time in every day practise is exhibited anything but a likeness to Christ.
While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities, and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.