Profound Thoughts on Prayer

From Deeping Your Conversation With God, "The less demanding and personal God is, the more boring he will be. One doesn’t pray to a God like that, one meditates; except for an elite few, one loses interest and falls asleep. An abstract, boring God is finally a shrunken God, too big and therefore too busy, we think, to get involved with people. But the God Jesus told us to pray to can both run the cosmos and knit a baby together in his mother’s womb. He can number both subatomic particles and the hairs on your head. Anything less, and he is shrunk to the size of the senator Julia Ward Howe invited to her home. She wanted him to meet the up-and-coming actor Edwin Booth, but he declined, explaining loftily, “The truth is, I have got beyond taking an interest in individuals.” She later commented sarcastically on his remark in her diary: “God Almighty has not got so far.” Indeed, George Buttrick was right when he said, “The field of second-rate religion is strewn with the corpses of abstract nouns.” A second-rate God will elicit a second-rate, boring prayer life."