Praying and Knowing things

In our Northampton group last night we discussed the balance between reading and praying in spiritual growth. Two of us had been through a phase of wanting to learn to pray better, then reading classic books on prayer, then realising that we weren't actually implementing the knowledge we were gaining. We weren't putting into practice what we were learning. We were acquiring more and more knowledge about what people said about prayer but our prayer lives were still stuck on the same level. One of the things that drew me to Carmel was the desire to go deeper into prayer, to learn to grow closer to God in prayer. Then I stopped reading spiritual books for a while, except one which I recommend to others, Fr Iain Matthew's The Impact of God. It's a guide to St John of the Cross, a small book that for me and others I know really packs a punch. To avoid getting back into the trap of growing in knowledge rather than actually growing in my prayer life, I would content myself with just reading a page or two at a time and ponder its message. Then the reading began to feed into my actual prayer. Limiting myself to a couple of pages reminded me that the reading was secondary, the prayer was the key thing.