On Prayer...

“Prayer is all about our loving relationship with God.”

“There is Somebody, a Mystery we call God who is greater than ourselves- holding us, loving us, sustaining us, nourishing us, giving us life.”

“We need to learn to pray with our hearts.”

“We need to bring to the Lord our experiences that really matter to us and that really affect us most deeply; our deepest concerns, our deepest joys, hopes, and desires, and even our greatest fears, hurts, pains, and securities. When we do this, then we learn to pray with our hearts and less with our minds. And when we learn to pray with our hearts, then prayer becomes truly a loving relationship with God.”

(Wood for the Fire by Fr. Ramon Maria Luiza Bautista, SJ)

Manifesto of Basic Principle and Foundation by St. Ignatius De Loyola

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in
prosecuting the end for which he is created.

From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought
to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it.

For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed
to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health
rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short
life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for
which we are created.

- St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises #23 Basic Principle and Foundation.