Monday 20 March 2006

Heart and Mind Prayer for Lent

Last Saturday some of us explored meditative and contemplative prayer as part of our observing a Holy Lent.

This morning I discovered this in Jeff Imbach's The River Within: Loving God, Living Passionately, (NavPress, 1998) on being in touch with God on the inside:
The Eastern Orthodox understanding of prayer is so very helpful here. For the Orthodox person, to pray is to descend with our mind into our heart and there stand before God.
In the footnote related to that statement he adds:
See Igumen Chariton of Valamo, comp., The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 63, where, for example, Theophan the Recluse is quoted as saying, "The principle thing is to stand with the mind in the heart before God, and to go on standing before Him unceasingly day and night, until the end of life."
How lovely!

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