From this day on you will commence your prayers with the posture and mode that you find best. You can say a brief prayer: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your children”, or any other that you find good. Try to place all your being in the presence of God.
Topic: prayer
To pray is to try and live an experience of God, in your complete self: body and spirit. And not as something extraordinary, but as something normal.
1. Nature grows by acquiring, it receives from the world outside (we do also); but a person also received from INSIDE; by maturation, becoming open to others. On the Cross the essential was not the suffering, but the giving of self.
2. To know a person is different from knowing about him. Eternal life is not knowing about God, but knowing Him: “This is eternal life, to know you, the only God and the one you sent, Jesus” (John 17,3).
3. In a dialogue the intellectual and affective content are differentiated, thoughts and feelings.
- Prayer is contact between two persons: listening, mutual presence, empathy if possible: “to be in the skin of the other”…
- All experience with people has 3 elements:
- Faith that that person is there and wants to communicate. I am going to communicate with Christ.
- It isn’t impossible: many people live this experience.
- It is the first and greatest communication. It is a personal relationship. You don’t need a lot of words: “I look at him and he looks at me”, said that adult man the “Saintly Parrish priest of Ars”, who spent hours and hours in front the tabernacle. “When you pray, do not be wordy. God knows what you need”. In America they say something that is valid in this context: --- don’t be a parrot!. A parrot repeats words, words that he neither knows nor lives.
Prayer should be integrated into my life.
- Jesus prays before the principal events of his life.
- He prays in his daily life: it was something normal: “he went away to pray”.
- He prays in his difficulties: e.g. In the Olive Grove.
- He prays in the moments of success: they wanted to make him king and they do so on the Cross.
- It was a complete existence give to the mystery of salvation. He cannot separate prayer from his life. To be contemplatives in action. Life pushes me, impulses me to pray.
My prayers should have community awareness: it isn’t just a personal affair. The first qualification that an Israelite had in order to pray was his BELONGING to the people of Israel, his belonging to a community. Jesus prays as a person and as a member of the Community. We are a people, a group; we are saved AS A BUNCH.
I can pray and present my problems, but with a community awareness: “I am not just me alone”. I don’t need physical company: but I am united with the people of God.I form part of that PACT that God made with his people.
In the “Our Father” all the prayers are in plural.
My prayer should be in answer to a NECESSITY: “I am IN NEED”. It isn’t something useful that I can use when I find it convenient. It is something that I NEED. It isn’t a MEANS, but rather and END: to praise “Praise his glory”.
I respect and ACCEPT God, but at the same time I feel respected and LOVED by God.
Difficulties: they exist. In a century when we seek efficiency, speediness, in many lives there is “lack of time”. The squandering that surrounds us. And, above all, the demands of God: God questions us; he puts our lives into question… we don’t want to hear. We don’t want to accept the new responsibility. In prayer I am the real me, without a mask. God and me. Once I have overcome this, the rest is simple, by the gratifying that it is, in spite of the aridity at times...
Practical decisions:
- Prayer is a journey towards the inside
- I love: it is a loving communication
- It is a daily necessity: in prayer we bring with us the world and our brothers. Trust Him: “I know who I trust” said Paul