“St. Teresa of Avila writes in her 8th Spiritual discourse that she feels she has ‘partly lost herself’. Doesn’t anyone feel this who truly prays? He who does not pray belongs to himself. He is responsible for himself and tries to reach his goal by his own efforts. He who prays knows he needs another. Gradually he realizes how much he needs this other to whom he turns in prayer, how he cannot live without him, how he can belong to none other but him who is his whole life. He is radically dispossessed of himself. He feels he has ‘partly lost himself’, he is not his own as he used to be, his treasure belongs to someone else. Everything in him in now open to another, available to another and waiting on him. And in this openness to another, he gives up his independence, only to find true freedom: freedom of believing in a love which expects everything and to which he admits he owes everything. At the centre of prayer there must be faith in that love which created us for itself and which does its own work in us, which satisfies the desire it has given us.”
-Georges LeFebvre, OSB
Courage to Pray
[New York: Paulist Press, 1973 - page 74]
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