That is why prayer requires discipline. Discipline means to create boundaries around our meeting with God. Our times and places can’t be so filled up that there is no way of meeting. So you have to work very hard to say this is the time in which I am with God, whether I like it or not, whether I feel like it, whether it satisfies me. It is very interesting that people who follow a prayer discipline for ten minutes a day or so, when they keep doing it regularly, eventually, they don’t want to miss it – even thought it doesn’t satisfy right away on the level of the flesh. They may be distracted throughout the whole tem minutes, but they keep going back to it. They say, “Something is happening to me on a deeper level than my thinking. I don’t have wonderful thoughts when I pray nor do I have wonderful feelings when I prayer, but God is greater than my heart and my mind.”

The larger mystery of prayer is greater than what I can grasp with my emotional senses or intellectual gifts. I trust that God is greater than me when I dwell – leg myself be held – in that place of prayer.


Henri J.M. Nouwen (Nijkerk, January 24, 1932 - Hilversum, September 21, 1996) A Dutch Catholic priest and writer who authored 40 books on the spiritual life.

The Only Necessary Thing: Living A Prayerful Life, Compiled & Edited by Wendy Wilson Greer. 1999. p. 94, 95. “Parting Words: A Conversation on Prayer with Henri Nouwen.” Fellowship in Prayer 47, no. 6 (December 1996): 6-20