Supplication

My dear God, Supplication. This is the only one of the four* I am competent in. It takes no supernatural grace to ask for what one wants and I have asked you bountifully, oh Lord. I believe it is right to ask You too and to ask our Mother to ask You, but I don't want to overemphasize this angle of my prayers. Help me to ask You, oh Lord, for what is good for me to have, for what I can have and do your service by having.

I have been reading Mr Kafka and I feel his problem of getting grace. But I see it doesn't have to be that way for the Catholic who can go to Communion every day. The [Monsignor] today said it was the business of reason, not emotion - the love of God. The emotion would be a help. I realized last time that it would be a selfish one. Oh dear God, the reason is very empty. I suppose mine is also lazy. But I want to get near You. Yet is seems almost a sin to suggest such a thing even. Perhaps Communion doesn't give the nearness I mean. The nearness I mean comes after death perhaps. It is what we are struggling for and if I found it either I would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be intolerable. I don't know about this or anything. It sounds puerile my saying anything so obvious.

*Adoration, contrition, thanksgiving and supplication. 

From A Prayer Journal, by Flannery O'Connor, pages 13/14

Pinning God down

As I read the Old and New Testaments I am struck by the awareness therein of our lives being connected with cosmic powers, angels and archangels, heavenly principalities and powers, and the groaning of creation. It's too radical, too uncontrolled for many of us, so we build churches which are the safest possible places in which to escape God. We pin God down, far more painfully than he was nailed to the cross, so that God is rational and comprehensible and like us, and even more unreal.

Madeleine L'EngleThe Irrational Season