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.
There is no condition of life in which we cannot abide in Jesus. We have to learn to abide in Him wherever we are placed.
The time you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the best time you will spend on earth. Each moment that you spend with Jesus will deepen your union with Him and make your soul everlastingly more glorious and beautiful in Heaven, and will help bring about everlasting peace on earth
O Lord, make this Lenten season different from the other ones. _x000D_ Let me find you again. Amen.
Prayer is where the action is.
Holy Angels, our advocates, our brothers, our counselors, our defenders, our enlighteners, our friends, our guides, our helpers, our intercessors - Pray for us.
In the inner stillness where meditation leads, the Spirit secretly anoints the soul and heals our deepest wounds.
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