Prayer for the Suffering

If your in the habit of praying daily, the words you speak can become empty of passion. That's frustrating! Today as I prayed for two who are in the midst of suffering, I felt the passion again. I prayed, with feeling, that God would not abandon them in their suffering, that though they knew He was near intellectually, they would know His presence existentially. I don't know why I am writing this on the blog, I'm just happy to feel it again, today. "Blessed are those who mourn..."

I read this today at Contratimes (the following is quoted from Contratimes, Bill Gnade):

Yesterday morning, while reading Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, a lengthy letter he drafted from prison, I found the following passage amid Wilde's struggles over Christ, suffering, and the consequences of being imprisoned:

"If ... a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I shouldn't mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? Besides, feasts are not for me any more. I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is over for me, very fortunately I dare say. But if ... a friend of mine had a sorrow, and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that could not be. I have a right to share in Sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world, and share its sorrow, and realize something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God's secret as anyone can get."