What we bring to the pursuit of the God of life is what we will get out of it. The regularity of prayer, the depth of our lectio, the embrace of silence, the space we give to the search for God, the surrender of our own obsessions with self to the concerns of God for the world—all these will determine the quality of the contemplation we achieve. Prayer becomes the olive press we walk, the chafing wheel we tread which, over and over again, breaks open our hearts to the Word of God. Then, finally, after years of immersion in daily prayer, we begin to be what we have prayed for all those years.
–from the book In God’s Holy Light: Wisdom from the Desert Monastics
by Joan Chittister, OSB
