Prayer that leads to the beauty of the image within is difficult for it requires honesty and humility. It requires freedom from expectations, projections, false hopes and self-centeredness. It means to be able to say, I am who I am with my strengths and weaknesses, gifts and failings. In one of his Admonitions Francis wrote, “what a person is before God, that he is and no more.” For Francis, humility and self-knowledge belong together. When we can accept our “thisness” then we are free to breathe in the love of God and can go out to embrace God in the other. Prayer, therefore, requires an honest encounter with God, a turning of the mind and heart to God. When we fail in this honesty we diminish ourselves because we fail to allow the fullness of God’s Spirit to move within us and thus we fail to come to our authentic selves in God.
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