Father Chet, March 1979
Our relationship with God is centered on prayer. Learning how to pray better means entering into a deeper and more personal relationship with God our heavenly Father and with Jesus our Divine Brother and Friend.
To feel fulfilled in prayer and establish union with God, we need to silence our wayward thoughts and desires. As we prepare to pray, we should eliminate as far as possible our sense of independence from God.
Preparing to Pray
First, we endeavor to silence our minds. Closing our eyes to shut out external disturbances or listening quietly to music may help. The music may be instrumental or a hymn which expresses in its words and in its music the mood we want to feel when approaching God. Our moods are likely to change depending on the day: joy, peace, gratitude, awe, delight, hope, trust, confidence, humility, patience, sorrow, emptiness.
Second, we need to silence our will, with its wayward desires, and surrender ourselves to the Divine Will. To do this we must believe that God is for us and not against us. It will help if, at the beginning of our prayer period, we make an act of faith and trust in God. We can do this by reminding ourselves (1) that God is all-good, all-loving, all-wise, all-powerful; (2) that God has made certain definite promises in our regard; and (3) that God is always faithful – we can count on God to help us in all our needs because God truly loves us.
Opening Ourselves
We can open ourselves without fear even to the awesome, mysterious side of God and say with all the honesty and sincerity of which we are capable: “Here I am, Lord. Take me as your own. Anything you want, I give you everything.”
We may say slowly the Suscipe of St. Ignatius:
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.
You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.
Another good prayer is Sebastian Temple’s Offertory Hymn: “All that I am, all that I do, all that I’ll ever have, I offer now to you. All that I dream, all that I pray, all that I’ll ever do, I give to you today. Take and sanctify these gifts for your honor, Lord. Knowing that I love and serve you is enough reward.”
Taking Time
We should be in no hurry to get through the first part of our prayer-time. A watchword for all prayer is never to hurry and pass on to something else, but rather to dally at any and every point along the way.
When we are praying, we have no other place to go. We have already arrived! When we surrender ourselves to God, we are more than preparing for prayer, for we are already at the very heart of prayer.
We should feel at home with God, free to stop and simply enjoy God’s presence. Even though we originally may have had something special in mind for consideration, it can almost always be put off until another day. The primary objective of all prayer is to relax and feel at peace with God, surrendering with joy to our God-given destiny.
Being in Communion
When praying, different people are led in different ways. The same person may be led in one direction one day and in another the next day. We should keep ourselves open to the Spirit and allow our prayer to go in whatever direction She calls to us.
Some days we may feel like spending the whole time in praising or thanking God for all that God has done for us. Other days we may be full of regret and sorrow for our sins and for the offenses of the whole world against God. Other times we may have many requests or petitions to make to the Lord. Some days we may just call before our mind’s eye our friends and loved ones; and while picturing their faces in our imagination, pray for them.
Sometimes we may have nothing to say. We may be like the old man of Ars whom Saint John Vianney asked what he did during his long periods in church. He replied, “I don’t do anything. I just look at God and God looks at me.”
When a deep relationship of unselfish love exists between two persons, there frequently is no need for either of them to talk. Lovers enjoy just being in one another’s company. When our relationship with God or Jesus Christ reaches the point where we no longer need to constantly talk, then we can say that we have arrived at true prayer.
Prayer as Listening
Another fundamental and important prayer attitude is listening to God. Jesus says that unless we become like little children before God, we cannot hope to enter God’s kingdom. A little child shows respect for their parents by listening to what they have to say. We owe God the respect of listening to what God might say before we start talking and sharing our troubles and our needs, or even our gratitude and praise.
When we use words like “listen” and “hear,”
we are not referring to actual sounds heard in our ears
but to a higher method of communication
which can be just as real
The listening process in prayer begins with an act of faith on our part that there is a real person whom we call God. Even though God is invisible, intangible, and inaudible, we believe that God is real.
In saying so, we are saying we believe there is another dimension of reality besides this earthly, visible, tangible, audible world. We can, and should, be convinced that this subliminal or transcendent dimension where God exists and where our own soul-life exists is even more real, more permanent, and more important that the physical, material world we can see and touch.
Revealing God’s Love
We need to believe that God wants to communicate with us and reveal God’s self to us. Why should God want to do this? Because God loves us, we are God’s children and creation.
God has definite ideas, plans, and designs concerning us. God wants us to know what these are; and we can never learn the purpose and destiny God has in mind for us unless these things are communicated and revealed to us.
We must make ourselves open and receptive to whatever God wishes to tell us. This means that we must not be afraid of God. Rather than imagining that God might tell us something that would be against our best interests, we need to trust that God has only our welfare and happiness at heart.
God created us to share with us God’s happiness, life, love, and God’s heavenly home. So rather than closing our mind in fear at what we might “hear,” we should open our minds and hearts to all that God is willing to reveal to us.
Being Patient
We must be patient and willing to wait – even for many years – until God reveals God’s self to us. Actually, the delay may not be God’s, but rather, our own inability to “hear.” We should not expect that listening to God will come easily. Sometimes God gets our attention in some extraordinary way as with St. Paul on the road to Damascus; but these are usually rare instances even in the lives of the saints.
For most people, the ordinary or usual way to hear and listen to God is by reading or hearing the Bible. We believe that the Sacred Scriptures are the Word of God and that the fifty or more persons responsible for the books of the Bible were “inspired” by God when writing them. This means that God’s eternal wisdom flowed through them.
We also believe that it is possible today to use this same insight into divine wisdom to discover God’s will for us. All that is needed is to transpose the eternal wisdom that was applied by the biblical writer to the situation in that particular community to a somewhat similar situation today.
This process of transposing the word of God from the Bible to our needs and problems is a form of listening to God. As the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it: “In times past God spoke in diverse and varied ways to our fathers through the prophets; in this, the final age, he has spoken to us through the Son. The Son is the reflection of the Father’s glory, the exact representation of the Father’s being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word” (Heb 1:1-3).
Seeing God
There are many other ways of listening to God. God is constantly being revealed to us through nature, through the whole of his created world and universe. Any experience of beauty, love, goodness, truth, or life is a valid experience of the reality of God. When we connect with any of these transcendental realities, we are connecting with God and allowing God to speak to us.
Listening to a beautiful piece of music, watching a sunrise or sunset, contemplating the ocean or the mountains, or any experience that evokes a depth of emotional response is in fact an exercise in communicating with God.
The root meaning of “Yahweh” is: “I am existence itself”
This is usually translated: “I am who am”
All such experiences may be true and valid forms of prayer. God indeed speaks to us in diverse and varied ways. We need only to sharpen those spiritual faculties of our nature which enable us to appreciate and understand true beauty, love, life, truth, and goodness.