True Prayer, Best Prayer

Sr. Ruth Burrows

“God blesses all sincere efforts [of prayer] and will look lovingly on all who seek him. If we are truly seeking him, he will enlighten us. This may prove painful. True prayer reveals us to ourselves in our sinfulness and spiritual inadequacy and at the same time enables us to accept it humbly and peacefully.”

An Interview in Christian Century Magazine

[I once heard a Holy Ghost Father say that we have all had the experience of praying for things, remembering that Jesus promised ‘…whatever you ask in my name, I will do it for you’, and then been surprised and disappointed when the prayer did not seem to be answered. There are many reasons, of course, the most important being that God knows better than we do what will really serve our life with him. But the one thing, the priest told us, you can ALWAYS ask for, that will ALWAYS be granted to you in every situation is this: ‘O God, let me find You in this’. Once we see that whatever we are experiencing, tiresome, joyful or terrible, is given to us for our good from the hand of God, we can accept it. Then we can exclaim with St. Francis de Sales, ‘Yes, heavenly father, I accept – everything. Yes, yes and always Yes!’]