Life of prayer

THIS is serious business for all of us, and in fact it admits of no exception. Prayer is the lifeline of our soul, just as eating and breathing are for our body. We need to do it not only to survive, but more to keep us spiritually vibrant and productive everyday.

Life should be a flow of prayer. Prayer should stream the whole of our life!

We therefore have to feel the constantly urgent task of improving the way we pray. We cannot allow it to be held hostage by the fluctuations of our moods and the ebb and flow of our human conditions, physical, social, psychological, etc.

Even in the worst scenario when we feel impeded to pray, or we find ourselves completely without energy, or like a dry and dead fossil uninspired, we simply have to find a way to do it. And there are always ways available.

St. John Mary Vianney, a simple but very holy priest, gives us an idea. "My God, if my tongue cannot say in every moment that I love you, I want my heart to repeat it to you as often as I draw breath," he once said in his pious reasoning.

Let's remember what St. Augustine once said: "Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

Those, who by reason of health, handicap or any problem are unable to consciously pray, can always be helped by others. What are we social beings for if we cannot also help others to pray? Our sociability can also extend to our spiritual duties, you know!

We have to be more aware of our vast powers and infinite ways to pray. What the body is unable and our feelings cannot cope, our spirit always can.

And in our spirit, what our mind cannot penetrate because of the mysteries, our heart always can. The heart does not seek to understand these mysteries. It simply enjoys them and gives witness to them.

This is our challenge. Especially these days when we can get harassed by many pressures, or drowned by information overdrive, or led to blind activism, it's good to be reminded that the possibility to pray is always there.

Obviously, our usual concern in this regard should be that we manage to do some personal mental prayer, at least for a few minutes everyday. If we want to convert our whole life into prayer, this task is a must.

We have to see it as something indispensable. We should stop treating it as if it competes with our other activities. We don't allow our work to compete with our meals, do we? We somehow manage to make them go together. The same should be true with our prayer and our other activities.

Growing deep in our prayer means a persistent desire to know and love our Lord better. Christ should not just be an idea, a slogan, a historical figure. He is a living person in the Holy Spirit. We have to be aware of this reality always, so we can behave accordingly.

We need to make many acts of the will and of the heart, that is, acts of faith and love, to sustain our mental prayer and engage our Lord in a loving conversation, or at least to simply feel and rejoice in his presence.

It's when we pray in this way that we enter deeper into reality, actually a richer reality, since it will be a reality that goes beyond what simply are sensible or even intelligible. It's the reality of the spiritual and the supernatural.

This is when we become spiritual, and not just material and carnal. This is when we acquire a supernatural outlook, and not just having some human attitudes.

This is when we behave according to faith, hope and charity, and actively enjoy and exercise the gifts of the Holy Spirit like wisdom, understanding, knowledge, piety, counsel, fortitude, fear of the Lord.

This is when we become contemplatives even if we are in the middle of the world.  We have to frequently ask ourselves whether we are praying and whether we are praying well. Are we growing in our identification with Christ?

We have to ask ourselves these questions because we can always deceive ourselves. With our capacity for plasticity, we can appear like praying, but really not praying.

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