Prayer

I was at an Adoration chapel last month. I had just settled down, ready to begin my prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament, when a father came in with his young son. The father tried to kneel in one of the pews but his son, true to his age, kept moving around. I suppose his father got distracted, so he sat down on the floor, picked up his son and plopped him down on his lap.

And there they sat, the father, looking up at the Blessed Sacrament praying, and his son, perfectly content and at ease in his father’s lap. They both stayed that way for a good long while, much longer than the attention span of any regular toddler. Eventually, the music from the church next door interrupted the silence and the young boy, still on his father’s lap, started singing.

I could have, I suppose, gotten very annoyed at the “interruption” in my prayer time but instead I felt very moved for I saw, in a very concrete way, how tenderly a father could love his child. I knew deep in my heart that this was how God loved me as well – even more. A thousand times more. Infinitely more.  And this was my prayer for that day. 

As I have grown in my prayer life, I’ve come to realize that there is no one specific way of praying. That every place can become sacred because God is everywhere and that if we are attuned enough to His presence, we can recognize him in everyone. I still do my vocal prayers, of course. I pray the Rosary daily and Novenas on occasion. But I also really like the “just noticing” and “just being” prayers.  This way, prayer becomes part of the everyday.

I suppose it’s a lot like playing a musical instrument. You start out learning the notes and going over them constantly, until you know them so well that every time you hear music you can recognize the notes from the song you know. And it doesn’t even matter anymore who is playing the song, you just know the notes.

Or it’s like spending time with a friend. At the start it’ll take effort to notice them, how they dress or how they sound when they laugh. If you know them well enough, you’ll be able to recognize them even from far away, and you’ll be able to pick out their laugh from among strangers.

Spending time with God in prayer allows us to get to know Him better so that when He speaks to us in other ways, through different situations and through various people, we’ll still know it’s Him.  And we’ll know that we’re never far from His embrace, even if like toddlers, we wander around sometimes.