“The more you pray,” Angela of Foligno wrote, “the more you will be enlightened.” But I knew better: The statement, as it stands, is both true and false. When we turn God into a vending machine, when we pray to “get” things rather than to get God — there is no “enlightenment” in that. When prayer is a journey into the mind and heart of God, into the nature of life, into the shaping of a holy heart, then it is necessarily enlightening. We come to understand ourselves: our fears, our darkness, our struggles, our resistance. Then we are faced with choice. That is enlightenment.
–Joan Chittester (1936-
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