No, by wordless prayer I didn’t mean the practice of the Presence of God. I meant the same mental act as in verbal prayer only without the words. The Practice of the Presence is a much higher activity. I don’t think it matters much whether an absolutely uninterrupted recollection of God’s presence for a whole lifetime is possible or not. A much more frequent and prolonged recollection than we have yet reached certainly is possible. Isn’t that enough to work on? A child learning to walk doesn’t need to know whether it will ever be able to walk 40 miles in a day: the important thing is that it can walk to-morrow a little further and more steadily than it did to-day.
I don’t think we are likely to give too much love and care to those we love. We might put in active care in the form of assistance when it would be better for them to act on their own: i.e., we might be busybodies. Or we might have too much ‘care’ for them in the sense of anxiety. But we never love anyone too much: the trouble is always that we love God, or perhaps some other created being, too little.
As to the ‘state of the world’ if we have time to hope and fear about it, we certainly have time to pray. I agree it is very hard to keep one’s eyes on God amid all the daily claims and problems. I think it wise, if possible, to move one’s main prayers from the last-thing-at-night position to some earlier time: give them a better chance to infiltrate one’s other thoughts.
It seems clear we could hardly go wrong with any of these efforts to commune with God. That which also seems clear is that we can’t love too much or care too much. We must be watchful however that our efforts are not misdirected by personal motives that are not loving and caring or those that are more about us than the person to whom we are directing our love and concern.
So, bothers and sisters, pray freely, often and in every form. And be sure that all our concerns be for the right thing, done the right way and being done for the right reasons. One can not go wrong if they are going right. This writer’s prayer is that God guide each of us to that righteousness and to the garden in which it abides.
Abiding in prayer,
Z gardener
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