SAUCIER — Prayer talk through time

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver asks on “A Summer Day.”

Quaker author Parker Palmer responds, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi poet and mystic, agrees: “The quieter you become the more you are able to hear.”

Benedictine monk Thomas Keating smiles, adding, “Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. In order to hear that language, we must learn to be still and to rest in God.”

Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, laments, “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you,” writer Anne Lamott reassures the group.

“The most powerful prayer, one well-nigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is,” the old German priest Meister Eckhart explains.

“Be still and know that I am God,” the Psalmist remembers.

“For prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God, frequently taking time to be alone with Him whom we know loves us,” Teresa of Avila avows.

“In the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair,” theologian and activist Howard Thurman adds.

German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer responds, “To pray is to breathe alongside God.”

“The actual relation to God is not that God hears what I say, but that I am being silent and hearing what God says,” the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard confesses.

Ancient poet and musician Ephrem of Syria explains: “Virtues are formed by prayer. Prayer preserves temperance. Prayer suppresses anger. Prayer prevents emotions of pride and envy. Prayer draws into the soul the Holy Spirit. ...”

“Tell me how you pray, and I will tell you how you live; tell me how you live and I will tell you how you pray,” Pope Francis says.

“Now is the season to know / That everything you do / is sacred,” the Persian poet Hafez declares.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel sums it up: “Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”