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.
Through adoration, the Christian mysteriously contributes to the radical transformation of the world and to the sowing of the Gospel. Anyone who prays to the Savior draws the whole world with him and raises it to God. Those who stand before the Lord are therefore fulfilling an eminent service. They are presenting to Christ all those who do not know him or are far from him: they keep watch in his presence on their behalf.
To become effective men of God, then, we must know and acknowledge that every grace and every virtue proceeds from God alone, and that not even a good thought can come from us except it be of Him.
Give yourselves to prayer and the ministry of the Word. If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry, as He did me, to teach you to pray.
Prayer unites the soul to God.
There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.
When prayer fades out, power fades out. We are as spiritual as we are prayerful; no more, no less.
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