Grant us, even us, O Lord, to know you, and love you and rejoice in you. And if we cannot do these perfectly in this life, let us, at least, advance to higher degrees every day, till we can come to do them in perfection. Let the knowledge of you increase in us here, that it may be full hereafter. Let the love of you grow every day more and more here, that it may be perfect hereafter; that our joy may be great in itself and full in you. We know, O God, that you are a God of truth. O make good your gracious promises to us, that our joy may be full. To your honor and glory, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns one God, world without end. Amen.

If anyone therefore desires to behold this image of God, he must love God so as to be loved by him, no longer as a servant but as a friend who observes his commandments, that he may enter the cloud where God is.

—Ambrose, On his Brother Satyrus 2.110

It is good to make confession to you, Lord, and to say “Have mercy on me; heal my soul, for I have sinned against you.” I must not abuse your mercy so as to make it license for sin, but remember the Lord’s saying “Look, you are made whole, now do not sin, lest something worse happen to you.” For you alone are the healer of the disease that afflicted me, you who resist the proud by give grace to the humble.

—Augustine, Confessions 4.3.4-5

I have come to believe that prayer is not a matter of my calling in an attempt to get God’s attention, but of my finally listening to the call of God, which has been constant, patient, and insistent in my inner being. God is reaching out to me, speaking to me, and it is up to me to learn to be polite enough to pay attention. When I do have something to say to God, I am rendering a response to the divine initiative. So the question of whether or not and how God answers prayer seems to me bogus questions. God speaks, all right. The big question is do I answer, do I respond, to an invitation that is always open.

—Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Speech, Silence, Action!