This makes me think... about praying more...

The central concern of most people seeking guidance in their pursuit of God is contemplative prayer...

[A] thirst for the divine... coincides with the biblical "one thing," the top priority in any human life: "to gaze on the loveliness of the Lord" (Ps 27:4, see also Lk 10:38-42 NAB).

It is not for nothing  that the very incarnation itself took place deep in the flesh of the contemplative woman par excellence, in her whose personal spiritual life is twice characterized by St. Luke as pndering the word in her heart. (Lk 2:19, 51.) As von Balthasar put it, "Because she was a virgin, which means pure, exclusive hearer of the Word, she became mother, the place of the incarnation of the Word."

Each of us is an incarnated puzzle, and each of us has an insatiable thirst for the infinite. Never content with the limited nibbles and tastes offered by created realities, we find buried in our depths a dynamic that is restless and voracious. Even the self-avowed atheist is, in his or her endless desires, a witness to this basic need for the divine. Though Jesus shared in none of our wounded sinfulness, his actions as well as his words pointed to the primacy of immersion in the Father: "In the morning, long before dawn... he went off to a lonely place and prayed there... He went off into the hills to pray... He would always fo off to some place where he could be alone and pray... He went out into the hills to pray... He was praying alone... He would spend the night on the hill..." (Mk 1:35, 6:46; Lk 5:16, 6:12, 9:18, 21:37.)


---Thomas Dubay, S.M. Seeking Spiritual Direction, Servant, 1993.