Remembering the facts of death and Heaven gives us an even more pressing reason to learn to pray: We do not have an infinite amount of time. We are one day nearer Home today than we ever were before. I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.'
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of prayer in the context of our mortality and the afterlife.
Peter Kreeft's quote reminds us that life is finite and the time we have should be cherished, especially when it comes to spiritual practices like prayer. He argues that prioritizing time for prayer over trivial pursuits, such as watching television, is essential because we will not regret investing in our spiritual connection when we face our own death.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of spirituality in daily life, this quote can remind the audience to focus on what truly matters.
Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. [...] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.
Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.
Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.
One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.
To those who does not know the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.
I had displeased the jacobins by blaming their aristocratic usurpation of legitimate powers; the priests of all sorts by claiming religious liberty; the anarchists by repressing them; and the conspirators by rejecting their offers.
The wisest among my race understand that agitations of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.
I insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their lives in their own way, too.
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.
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