The tale of the Fisher King begins with a boy having to spend the night alone in the forest to prove his courage so he can become king. While he's spending the night alone, he's visited by a sacred vision: out of the fire appears the Holy Grail, the symbol of God's divine grace, and a voice says to the boy: "You shall be keeper of the Grail so that it may heal the hearts of men."
But the boy was blinded by greater visions of a life filled with power and glory and beauty, and in this state of radical amazement, he felt, for a brief moment, not like a boy, but invincible, like God. So he reached in the fire to take the Grail and the Grail vanished, leaving him with his hand in the fire, to be terribly wounded.
Now, as this boy grew older, his wound grew deeper, until one day, life for him lost its reason. He had no faith in any man, not even himself; he couldn't love or feel loved; he was sick with experience — he began to die.
One day a fool wandered into the castle and found the king alone. Now, being a fool, he was simple-minded. He didn't see a king—he only saw a man alone and in pain.
And he asked the king, "What ails you, friend?"
The king replied, "I'm thirsty. I need some water to cool my throat."
So the fool took a cup from beside his bed, filled it with water, and handed it to the king. As the king began to drink he realized that his wound was healed. He looked in his hands and there was the Holy Grail — that which he had sought all of his life.
He turned to the fool and said with amazement, "How could you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?"
The fool replied, "I don't know. I only knew that you were thirsty."
Simone Weil:
When we pray, "Thy Kingdom Come," this concerns something to be achieved, something not yet here. The kingdom of God means the complete filling of the entire soul of intelligent creatures with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit bloweth where he listeth? We can only invite him. We must not even try to invite him in a definite and special way to visit us or anyone else in particular, or even everybody in general; we must just invite him purely and simply, so that our thought of him is an invitation, a longing cry. It is as when one is in extreme thirst, ill with thirst; then one no longer thinks of the act of drinking in relation to oneself, or even of the act of drinking in a general way. One merely thinks of water, actual water itself, but the image of water is like a cry from our whole being.
