Prayer is a Blank Page

This Lent I am re-visiting a Lenten book by Emilie Griffin called Small Surrenders, which is currently marked 60% off its list price at Amazon. I am struck again by Griffin's metaphor of prayer as a "blank page."

Griffin quotes Murray Bodo: "Sometimes there might be no words, but only a blank page created by silence and space. . . . But you are in the process of praying." (83)

(Finding that link for Murray Bodo excited me when I learned that he is a Franciscan priest.)

Now for Emilie Griffin's words:

"Possibly the blank page is a test, a trial, a kind of formation." (84)

"Even more, we must come to understand that this emptiness, this blank page, is prayer. It is more than an invitation to pray. It is actually prayer. We are making a small and needed surrender to the way things are: we are relenting, we are unwinding." (85)

Griffin, Emilie. Small Surrenders: A Lenten Journey. Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2007.