“Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to.

“You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon.

“The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.

“I do not know you God because I am in the way.

“Please help me to push myself aside.”*

*A prayer from Flannery O’Connor, American novelist, short story writer, essayist and devout Catholic.