This is a quotation from the first page of Met. Anthony Bloom’s Courage to Pray:
“Prayer is the search for God, encounter with God, and going beyond this encounter in communion. Thus it is an activity, a state and also a situation; a situation both with respect to God and the created world. It arises from the awareness that the world in which we live is not simply two dimensional, imprisoned in the categories of time and space, a flat world in which we meet only the surface of things, an opaque surface covering emptiness. Prayer is born of the discovery that the world has depths; that we are not only surrounded by visible things but that we are also immersed in and penetrated by invisible things. And this invisible world is both the presence of God, the supreme, sublime reality, and our own deepest truth. Visible and invisible are not in opposition neither can they be juxtaposed like in an addition sum. They are present simultaneously, as fire is present in red hot iron.”
2 comments:
Beautiful...
Can I be so bold as to say, "Pray for us, Vladika Anthony!"
yeah... i talked about that first page of his book for over a month... i had read it at Victoria's house, actually, on labour day, which was the beginning of the actual in-the-church journey into Orthodoxy.
[shannon had gotten the book from church that day, phil insisting on buying it for her and so i did not have a copy of it, which is why i talked for a month about that first page...later shannon gave me the book...]
Victoria had a picnic and phil took shannon and i to it... it will always remain a treasured memory and time in my life... as that book also has been transforming me...
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