The dialogue within

Katie van Schaijik | Dec 17, 2015

Another day, another beautiful, personalist insight. This one's from Pope Paul VI:

It is necessary that everyone learn to pray both in himself and by himself. A Christian must know how to have a personal prayer life. Every soul is a temple. And when do we enter into this temple of our consciousness to worship God who is present there? Would we be empty souls, even though Christians, souls that are not present to themselves, forgetting the mysterious and ineffable encounter, the filial and inebriating dialogue that God, the one God in three Persons, deigns to offer to us within ourselves?

I'm noting especially these things:

- The link between being present to ourselves and prayer

- The inseparability of the dignity of the person and the dialogue with God within. (This has been a constant refrain of all the post-Vatican II Popes: Seek God "within".)

- The possibility of empty-souled Christians

- Prayer should be not just sustaining, but "inebriating." 

Maranatha.