Where I had a problem with much of the previous chapters I had the opposite reaction to this whole chapter. I might sound prideful to say that I feel like Manning truly hit the nail on the head regarding prayer - the meaning of it, access to it, problems we have with it. Perhaps a better way to state it is what he wrote resonated with my thinking about prayer and new thoughts he shared made perfect sense to me.
I think his Catholic background aided him in the practice of prayer. He says, "Recognition of the problem (of prayer) is not the answer. Action is. One learns to pray by praying. Two twenty-minute periods of prime time in solitary prayer, morning and evening, before a symbol of the crucified Christ is the most effective discipline I have found for making conscious contact with the living God and his liberating love."
He talks about how "Christian piety has prettified the passionate God of Golgotha", how we have taken the holy, reverent, passion of the access to the cross and minimized it into a necessary inconvenience.
I was inspired and challenged by this chapter.
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