1 Comments:

 Holly said...

Taking God up on His offer of "Free Grace" is pretty important, for He calls us to live a supernatural life. 'Super' means 'above' the natural. Just as Superman needed his special above-human powers to leap tall buildings with a single bound, so too we cannot follow the demands of the Gospel with our own natural efforts. We absolutely need grace to follow Jesus, and this is accessed in prayer. Now we have free will and can always moan about running out of gas in the middle of the desert, but it really is our own fault if we didn't fill up when we had the chance.

Do We Really Want to Make Life Harder on Ourselves??

St Theresa of Avila pitied Christians who try to live a life pleasing to God without prayer and could not understand how anyone would give it up or neglect it:

"Really I cannot see any reason [for not praying or giving up prayer] unless it is that they want to endure the trials of life by adding more trials to them and to shut the door upon God so that He shall not give them the joy of prayer. I am indeed sorry for such people, for they are serving God at a great cost to themselves. But when people practice prayer the Lord Himself bears the cost: in exchange for a little labor on their part, He gives them such consolations as will enable them to bear their trials.... [if people do not pray] I do not see how He will bestow upon them [graces and consolations]; for though He may wish to take His delight in a soul and to give that soul delight, there is no way for Him to do so, since He must have it alone and pure and desirous of receiving His favors."

If we don't eat, our bodies starve. If we don't do housework, our homes are a mess. If we don't pray, we just can't live a Christian life and get to heaven. Hhmmm! Sounds pretty obvious then, doesn't it?

St Teresa also tells us here that we need to 'want God', to have desire for Him. Now, we may not find much appealing about reading words from a prayer book for 15 minutes. But what can fuel our desire is the expectation of having a personal encounter with God . Real prayer is when we go off into our private rooms (be it our bedrooms or our hearts) and speak to God and listen to God.

God wants us alone with Him and desirous of Him and He will give us Himself, His Presence, and the graces we need to live our vocations properly. There is nothing more refreshing, more meaningful, and more addictive than meeting God! And the benefits of being strengthened to live our lives as He wishes are frosting on the cake.

Just Go To The Bus Stop!

Prayer must become a fundamental part of our daily lives, and this does not mean paying lip service to our Christianity, by saying we pray, but not really praying. Christianity demands real prayer.

Real prayer is like going to the bus stop to pick up Jesus. It means we stop what we are doing regularly and 'go to meet Jesus', just as if we have to pick him up at the bus stop at a certain time. We go, we sit on the bench, we wait. We recollect ourselves; instead of dragging all our present concerns with us; we work to remove all the distractions from our minds in expectation of Jesus coming to us. We become 'recollected' in anticipation of a meeting with Him. We can 'do' various forms of prayer while waiting on the bench – from meditating on Scripture to praying a Chaplet or rosary, or to doing some spiritual reading to feed us.

Over time we will find that we will experience a growing desire to encounter Jesus in a deeper, more personal way. For this we can do what St Theresa of Avila called 'mental prayer'. We can picture a scene from the Gospel with Jesus in it and then go be with Him, right in it! So we sit beside Him in his agony in the garden and console him. He help him carry His Cross. We listen to Him teach us about the Beatitudes. Our minds (imaginations) become active by holding on to the image, and what happens next is that our hearts then become free to love Jesus. Soon we are doing 'affective prayer', made sweet by our sentiments of love for Him.

Wait For God, Whether He Seems to Show Up or Not

Sometimes prayer is 'dry' which means that we basically don't feel anything. As far as I can see, if I am at the bus stop, it is up to Jesus to be on that bus, and if He shows up, then I can run gratefully and lovingly into His arms. But if He doesn't seem to show up, I have still done my part. In truth, the deepest spiritual communications between God and ourselves are most usually not perceptible to the senses and emotions anyway.

It helps to remember : I can't make God come to me, I can only make myself available to Him. Better that I'm there and that He not appear to come, than have Him come and I am not there! "OK Jesus, I didn't feel you come this morning. Maybe you'll show up on the afternoon bus..." And we carry on.

In addition, our prayer needs to be pure in motive. We must leave our own consolation in prayer to God and be faithful in going into periods of prayer whether we feel anything or not, whether we 'get anything out of it' or not. It is not unusual to experience a certain dryness in prayer. St Theresa of Avila shares her difficulties:

"... very often, over a period of several years, I was more occupied in wishing my hour of prayer were over, and in listening whenever the clock struck, than in thinking of things that were good. Again and again I would rather have done any severe penance that might have been given me than practice recollection as a preliminary to prayer... I did not at once betake myself to prayer; and whenever I entered the oratory I used to feel so depressed that I had to summon all my courage to make myself pray at all... Afterwards, when I had forced myself to pray, I would find that I had more tranquillity and happiness than at certain other times when I had prayed because I wanted to."

The whole matter of being faithful in prayer, in struggling to pray in certain seasons of our life, to making ourselves available whether He seems to come or not , is not always easy. But our intellect tells us that God Himself knows what we need. St Therese of Lisieux called herself the 'little ball' of Jesus, and at times He seemed to ignore her. She said that if Jesus wanted to poke a hole in her and throw her in the corner, that was up to Him. She might be an abandoned little ball with a hole in it, but she was still His ball !

All of us can relate to this. The key is not to give up, nor to be angry or resentful or disappointed in God, for we can't change Him. But we can work on ourselves. We can be faithful. We can do what we need to do. St. Theresa of Avila compared it to a gardener in the garden of the King. If His Majesty chose to send a rain of consolations and good feelings, well and good. But if He didn't send rain, then the gardener's job still hadn't changed – he was still to till the garden and weed the plants and keep on working.

Basically then, our prayer lives depend on a firm commitment to fidelity to God and a decisive rejection of petulance! No more pouting because we don't feel wonderful in prayer all the time! I don't think we feel wonderful all the time with our husbands either, but we still spend the time...

Doing Our Part and Letting God Do His

So first, we must mind our own business and let God do what He wills and leave His work up to Him. But we still have to do our part, and that means setting aside definite times for prayer and being faithful to it. Let the King rule His kingdom and let us tend the garden. Prayer can always be something we 'do' instead of something we 'feel'.

And as we tend and weed and hoe, let's try not to get grumpy. Real prayer requires that we purify our motives and avoiding self-seeking in prayer. It boils down to one question: What are we looking for? Do we seek the God of consolations, or the consolations of God? God wants us to want Him, not what we 'get' from Him. Fostering a pure attitude in prayer will eventually prepare us for deeper contemplative encounters with God.

2:21 PM  

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