What's prayer? It's shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who's to say? It's reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish into the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell him sins that he already knows full well. You seek to change his changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast. Prayer is the wind that fills his sail. Else drift with witless tides. And sometimes, by God's grace, a prayer is heard. Frederick Buechner
Some Similar Quotes
  1. If I am right, Thy grace impart Still in the right to stay; If I am wrong, O, teach my heart To find that better way! - Alexander Pope

  2. Writing is prayer. - Franz Kafka

  3. I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer. - Martin Luther

  4. I don't pray because it doesn't work. Prayer doesn't fix anything. Bad things happen anyway. - Nicholas Sparks

  5. Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you, conduct pleasing to you, faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and a hope of finally embracing you. Amen. - Thomas Aquinas

More Quotes By Frederick Buechner
  1. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces....

  2. Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.

  3. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

  4. Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis...

  5. To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the...

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