Personal Prayer Quotes

“Our union is in love, not in thought, “because he can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought. Therefore, though it is good at times to think of the kindness and worthiness of God in particular, and though this is a light and a part of contemplation, nevertheless, in this exercise, it must be cast down and covered over with a cloud of forgetting.”4 Even knowing this, however, we may still feel ridiculous when we can find no words to describe God after spending so much time in prayer. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing has learned to embrace his poverty when he can state it simply, “But now you put me a question and say: ‘How might I think of [God] in himself, and what is he?’ And to this I can only answer thus: ‘I have no idea.’ For with your question you have brought me into that same darkness, into that same cloud of unknowing.”5 In my human poverty, I must learn to accept prayer that seems useless, leaving me with nothing to show for it.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“In liturgical prayer we experience most intensely that we are not made to be individual supermen who transcend the limits of humanity and no longer need anyone else. Rather we are called into ever deeper relationships with everyone as we grow in our relationship with God.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“Love is only satisfied with what is infinite. In our love of God we taste this, and in suffering we long not only for more love, but for infinite love, a love that includes every tear ever shed and every loss ever felt.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“Prayer is abandoning ourselves to God with radical trust, and then remaining there in attentive vulnerability.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“Christ’s resurrection is not an event of the past; it contains a vital power which has permeated this world. Where all seems to be dead, signs of the resurrection suddenly spring up. It is an irresistible force. Often it seems that God does not exist: all around us we see persistent injustice, evil, indifference and cruelty. But it is also true that in the midst of darkness something new always springs to life and sooner or later produces fruit. On razed land life breaks through, stubbornly yet invincibly. However dark things are, goodness always re-emerges and spreads. Each day in our world beauty is born anew, it rises transformed through the storms of history. Values always tend to reappear under new guises, and human beings have arisen time after time from situations that seemed doomed. Such is the power of the resurrection.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“The many ways we have felt angry or cheated, rejected or misunderstood, isolated or forgotten, used or abused, only drive us deeper into victimhood, self-pity, and sadness. Our ego is expensive to keep fed, and makes extraordinary demands without ever being satisfied. When the ego becomes more and more inflated, the self is always imploding.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“There comes a revelation through the lens of the infinite love of God how selfish we really are, and how isolating and imprisoning this selfishness is, how self-focus keeps us superficial and petty and keeps us always feeling like we are running out of whatever it is we think we want. The interior reflection of who I really am frees me more from the demands of my own ego or self and allows the faculties wasted in disordered self-love to seek a more worthy object. My ability to love myself comes besides, after I love God and then other people, as Jesus showed in setting the priority of the commandments.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“Through prayer, all of reality becomes somehow illuminated by the love of God. It is seen mostly by the eyes of the heart and mysteriously it pours over somehow into actual external sight. Sometimes we see how God is in all things, which at the same time are not themselves divine but are rather given by God. These gifts become transparent to us as the fruit of prayer and deepening interiority, and we learn to see the Giver in all things. What we hear has a transparent clarity: the singing of a bird, the voice of another person, the beauty of a piece of music. We see and hear the vulnerability of all life and the precious uniqueness of every single thing, of every single being. When we see the luminous beauty of all of creation, it becomes easy to believe that each precious creature, each precious moment will ultimately flow into God’s eternity, where it will not disappear but will eternally be preserved as precious.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“When anointing a dying patient or celebrating a Mass with children, the responses may be inadequate or missing completely. Children scream during their own Baptisms, which should be the greatest moment of their lives, and parents spend all their attention fussing over how to make them stop, rather than witnessing the sublime reality that is taking place. The Church is human and divine, and so are the Sacraments, and so is our prayer. But the meaning of the Incarnation is precisely that the divine can become fully human without loss of divinity and even so can raise up the human to make it divine without loss of our humanity.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“To be little is not attributing to oneself the virtues that one practices, believing oneself capable of anything, but recognizing that God places this treasure in the hands of His little child to be used when necessary; but it remains always God’s treasure.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“But it is His silence that also makes prayer universal. People who cannot speak, from infants in utero to elderly with dementia, from the severely disabled to the man drawing his dying breath, can all pray by being in relationship with God in silence. The one who is poor, hungry, lost, little, sick, or imprisoned can still be in silent union with Christ: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matt 25:40). And so each one of us ultimately experiences the deepest union with God not through words but in the silence of trust and surrender, like a baby in her mother’s arms.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“Although we have a tendency to make prayer complicated as we try to be overly sophisticated in our approach to God, prayer is actually very simple. He has only one message: unconditional love. He has only one Word: His eternal Son. He speaks only one language: silence. We can get frustrated at God’s silence, wanting Him to say something to us. But God’s language is silence. As St. John of the Cross said, everything God has ever created or said, He has spoken with one Word, and it is eternally being spoken out of silence.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“For a baby at rest in its mother’s arms, there is the most profound communication of love taking place that gives life to the baby and fosters growth, but which the baby is not able to consciously acknowledge. Likewise, we spend our whole lives in the arms of God, being loved by Him, without realizing that we are in the arms of God. The deepest prayer is a silent acknowledgement of that fact, expressed in a choice to receive His love and to rest in Him.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“Abiding in God does not take away human freedom! It teaches us how to surrender. In our fallen nature, we are born with an instinct and a desire to be our own masters. Nonetheless, we are capable of freely disposing our will to submit to the mastery of another. This happens in marriage, and in many other ways such as in family, in community, and in other relationships. It can happen most radically with God, and then we find ourselves in the present moment where God acts. Disheartened despair comes from always dwelling in the past or future. Finding life as gift in the here and now brings us to the heart of reality, to the Incarnation, the mystery more real than any reality, the Word made flesh.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love

“Even in situations which appeared to end tragically, in loss and death, much fruit will come from them.”
― Thomas Acklin, Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love