Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.
Interpretation
Spiritual reading fosters a deeper prayer life and enriches one's connection to the divine.
Evelyn Underhill emphasizes the importance of spiritual reading in enhancing one's practice of prayer. She suggests that engaging with sacred texts is not only beneficial but essential for cultivating a meaningful relationship with the divine, especially when it comes to contemplative or adoring forms of prayer.
In practice
In a sermon about the importance of prayer, a pastor might quote Evelyn Underhill to reinforce the value of spiritual reading.
Nothing in all nature is so lovely and so vigorous, so perfectly at home in its environment, as a fish in the sea. Its surroundings give to it a beauty, quality, and power which are not its own. We take it out, and at once a poor, limp dull thing, fit for nothing, is gasping away its life. So the soul, sunk in God, living the life of prayer, is supported, filled, transformed in beauty, by a vitality and a power which are not its own.
As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone—though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men—so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.
God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.
As the genuine religious impulse becomes dominant, adoration more and more takes charge. 'I come to seek God because I need Him', may be an adequate formula for prayer. 'I come to adore His splendour, and fling myself and all that I have at His feet', is the only possible formula for worship.
I have an idea heaven will be both absolutely happy and absolutely dark, to protect us from the blaze of God.
Much is now being said about evangelism; but before we get effective evangelism, we have to get effective evangelists. Evangelism is useless unless it is the work of one devoted to God, willing and glad to suffer all things for God, penetrated by the attractiveness of God. New machinery, adaptations and adjustments, are not the first need... but more devoted, adoring, sacrificial souls.
If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.
Dear God, I give this time of quiet to You. Please dissolve my thoughts of stress and fear And deliver me to the inner place Where all is peace and love. Amen.
Dear God, I surrender this thought to you, for I would see the miracle that lies behind it. Amen.
The primary purpose of prayer is not to make requests. The primary purpose is to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song, and man cannot live without a song. Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.
Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul's language.
Our passion is to imitate the ministry of Jesus in the power of the Spirit. This requires we must follow Jesus out of baptismal waters, through our personal deserts, and into the harvest. We want to take the ammunition of the balanced evangelical theology with the fire power of Pentecostal practice, loading & readying the best of both worlds to hit the target of making & nurturing disciples.
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