Quote:
Countless sicknesses have been cure, lives made whole, and despairing hearts mended; yet in this optimistic program
of do-it-yourself redemption there is something that seems, paradoxically, to vitiate prayer. All too easily, prayers
that are pure alleluia and no miserere collapse into a dull monotone. All too easily, the dialogue between I
and Thou becomes a monologue between I and Me. All too easily, the spirituality of thoughts as forces shrinks down
to a psychology of self-hypnosis. The God within, who is always on call, is not nearly as evocative as the God without,
whose face is sometimes hidden. Even great mystics such as Ramana Maharshi and Sri Ramakrishna experienced, in
the midst of their union with the divine, the mystery of God's awful and wonderful otherness. Healing prayer is an
inestimatable gift; but prayer that is therapeutized surely lacks the resources to sustain a flourishing religious culture
like that of the Navajo or the crofters of the Carmina Gadelica.
Eventually one tires of oneself, even of one's higher Self. It avails much to pray, but when it becomes no
more than a self-help technique, the adventure of prayer is over.
--
Prayer: a history by Philip and Carol Zaleski, pgs.329-330