In his sermon last Sunday, Pope Francis drew a distinction between opening ourselves before God and looking to God for confirmation of our existing ideas and beliefs.

 “Brothers and sisters, when faith and prayer are true, they open the mind and the heart; they do not close them,” said the Pope. Looking for confirmation of what we already believe, “does not help us to truly encounter him, nor to open ourselves up to the gift of his light and his grace, in order to grow in goodness, to do his will and to overcome failings and difficulties,” he said.

 From our own Anglican tradition, the very same point was made by one-time Dean of Westminster Abbey, Very Revd Michael Mayne, in his book about his ME diagnosis, “A Year Lost and Found”: “Waiting on God is hard when you are dispirited by illness. But part of waiting on God, learning to be passive in a way creative for your inner life, is not a question of thinking about God, but of growing in stillness. It has to do with prayer, and with music or from the simple contemplation of the world about you.”

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