Saturday, March 14, 2009

learning to pray

Our learning to pray means our being taught how to receive long-lasting, up-building desires, over time, in imitation of the desire of someone who likes us, not the short-term, malleable desires of someone for whom we are a means to an end. It is because we don't know what we desire, and don't have strong enough desire, that we are ordered to pray without ceasing, so that we can have our desire strengthened and made simple rather than contradictory and belittling. In other words, we are being given the sort of desire that will enable us not to be moved by the social other but instead empower us as creators of a quite different social other.
James Alison, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in. New York: Continuum, 2006. 38.

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