Prayers & Thoughts on Prayer

KC never claimed she wrote prayers all by herself, all alone.

She told me that she was inspired by her Voice, wrote drafts and asked for guidance on specific wording and phrasing when unsure.

Whenever possible, she would write on her iPad in our backyard.  We both loved being outdoors.  In the hot weather, we'd run misters, and in the cold, we'd bundle up and use throws.

She'd send her final versions to me via Gmail (since I was often away, working part-time, especially during 2019-20) and the time and dates provided below are from these emails.

I just started reading the quote in your email, which made me smile because I had just started writing down my thinking process and I could instantly see the similarity:

The birth of a thought


The recognition of a thought


The examination of a thought


The formalization of a thought


The preservation of a thought

This is part of the creative process for me but also the way at which I arrive at "truths".  The formalization of a thought is very interesting for me because it involves memorization, similar to pre-literacy when people memorized sagas or the Bible.

It's also somewhat like formal prayer: repetition is also involved. The best way to memorize a prayer is to repeat it.

This is the way we thought about important things for most of human history. Which brings me to "Previous ages did not know this tension."  That whole passage is fascinating, as I don't feel that tension particularly. 

And the answer to how could that be may lie in not what I think about but *how* I think about it. 

It seems I unconsciously adopted a method of thought that constantly turns thought into prayer: a method of thought that has its roots in the Bible and in me may even have been derived from reading the Bible as a child.

As a segue, I highly recommend reading the book on Sister Consolata. The whole section on Jesus rejecting useless thoughts is fascinating, for example.  And of course, fundamentally He is guiding her to prayer. 

I think we underestimate the power of prayer as a method of organizing our thoughts.  What I am saying is that if done right *all* thinking can be prayer.