"Then I Offer You My Tiny Fish..."

"I write just as the ideas come into my head. I sit, as it were, and cast my fishing line at random into the little stream flowing through my heart. Then I offer you my tiny fish just caught as they are." St. Therese of Lisieux

I love this line from the book "The Story of a Soul". It is totally how this blog is written. I don't go to certain streams for the right fish, I catch them, right in my own little stream...as they are. Sometimes I think I look back and want to throw those fish that were caught, back into the stream while I search for better ones. But no, the fish you see are the ones you see for the moment...caught in whatever state I find it. There is no doctoring up. It's not really polished, but it is real. Sometimes I think before I write, "What do I have to say?" For some reason, when I start typing, it starts coming out. When I'm really stuck, I do "A Snapshot". That's why I started those. So I could get a starting point for my brain to thinking.

Just yesterday, my brother-in-law (a Youth Minister), e-mailed a bunch of people asking for quotes on "Prayer". He already had some and wanted to make sure he wasn't missing any important ones. Give me an assignment and I will come through! I love the topic of prayer. I immediately started pouring into my Mother Teresa and St. Therese books. I thought I would share with you what I gave him.

Since I love Mother Theresa…here are some to choose from that came from her book “No Greater Love”:

“We want so much to pray properly and then we fail. We get discouraged and give up. If you want to pray better, you must pray more. God allows the failure but He does not want the discouragement. He wants us to be more childlike, more humble, more grateful on prayer, to remember we all belong to the mystical body of Christ, which is praying always.”

“Our prayers should be burning words coming fourth from the furnace of hearts filled with love. In your prayers, speak to God with great reverence and confidence. Do not drag behind or run ahead; do not shout or keep silent, but devoutly, with great sweetness, with natural simplicity, without any affection offer your praise to God with the whole heart and soul.”

“Often a deep and fervent look at Christ is the best prayer: I look at Him and He looks at me.”

“In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself.”


And my other favorite….St Therese of Lisieux from her autobiography, “The Story of a Soul”:

“For me, prayer means launching out of the heart toward God; a cry of grateful love from the crest of joy or the trough of despair; it is the despair; it is a vast, supernatural force that opens out my heart, and binds me close to Jesus.”

“The power of prayer is really tremendous. It makes one like a queen who can approach the king at any time and get whatever she asks for. To be sure of an answer, there is no need to recite from a book a formula composed for the occasion. If there were, I should have to be pitied.”

“Though I’m quite unworthy, I love to say the Divine Office every day, but apart from that I cannot bring myself to hunt through books for beautiful prayers. There are so many of them that I get a headache. Besides, each prayer seems lovelier than the next. I cannot say them all and do not know which to choose, I behave like children who cannot read: I tell God very simply what I want and He always understands. For me, prayer is an upward leap of the heart, an untroubled glance towards heaven, a cry of gratitude and love which I utter from the depths of sorrow as well as from the heights of joy. It has a supernatural grandeur which expands the soul and unites it with God. I say an Our Father or a Hail Mary when I feel so spiritually barren that I cannot summon up a single worthwhile thought. These two prayers fill me with rapture and feed and satisfy my soul.”