Lent with Anthony Bloom: Reading #3

Excerpts from his anthology, Creative Prayer

This year’s daily Lent postings for my subscribers will taken from a short anthology of writings on prayer taken from the corpus of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom. Without a paid subscription, only the first portion of the post will be available.

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PRAYER AS ENCOUNTER

Encounter is central to prayer. It is the basic category of revelation, because revelation itself is an encounter with God who gives us a new vision of the world. Everything is encounter, in Scripture as in life. It is both personal and universal, unique and exemplary.

It always has two poles: encounter with God and in him with creation, and encounter with man in his depths rooted in God’s creative will, straining towards fulfillment when God will be all in all.

This encounter is personal because each of us must experience it for himself; we cannot have it second-hand. It is our own, but it also has a universal significance because it goes beyond our superficial and limited ego.

This encounter is unique because for God as for one another when we truly see, each of us is irreplaceable and unique. Each creature knows God in his own way. Each one of us knows God in our own way which no one else will ever know unless we tell them. And at the same time because human nature is universal, each encounter is exemplary. It is a revelation to all of what is known personally to each.