If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.
Interpretation
True prayer requires a focus on the divine and a dismissal of worldly distractions.
Johannes Tauler emphasizes the importance of turning away from all worldly and temporal distractions to engage in genuine prayer. He suggests that true communion with the divine can only occur when we fully dedicate our hearts and minds to a spiritual focus, free from the clamor of external influences.
In practice
During a spiritual retreat, you might share this quote to emphasize the need for detachment from daily distractions while engaging in prayer.
Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.
Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.
Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.
As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.
If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.
If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.
Remember God is not surprised by your inabilities, your imperfections, or your faults. He has always known everything about you that you are just now finding out, and he chose you on purpose for himself.
By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us - set us right with him, make us fit for him - we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that's not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand - out in the wide open spaces of God's grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.
A servant of the Lord stands bodily before men, but mentally he is knocking at the gates of heaven with prayer.
It is not because we are drawn to prayer that we first begin to pray; more often, we have to begin prayer, and then the taste and the desire for it come.
One of the values of centering prayer is that you are not thinking about God during the time of centering prayer so you are giving God a chance to manifest. In centering prayer there are moments of peace that give the psyche a chance to realize that God may not be so bad after all. God has a chance to be himself for a change.
Prayer gives us strength for great ideals, for keeping up our faith, charity, purity, generosity; prayer gives us strength to rise up from indifference and guilt, if we have had the misfortune to give in to temptation and weakness. Prayer gives us light by which to see and to judge from God's perspective and from eternity. That is why you must not give up on praying!
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