Prayer and life

OUR prayer should reflect the drama of our life. It should do so not only in the general features of our life, but also and most especially in the detailed, day-to-day twists and turns of our life.

If we understand what prayer really is, then we can and should also understand why it should be that way. That’s because prayer is where we unite all the events of our life, both the big ones and the small, with God.

Our life is supposed to be a life with God. It’s not just our life. It is God’s and ours. That’s how we have been created. That’s how we have been equipped and outfitted.

We are image and likeness of God, and with his grace made also children of his, meant to participate in his very own life. As image and likeness of God, we have been equipped with intelligence and will so that we can potentially enter into his life.

And with his grace, we can actually share in that divine, trinitarian life, making us children of his, and not just another creature. Our status and dignity in the whole of the material universe is actually the highest.

In short, we can say that while God is objectively with us, we have to make sure that we subjectively should be aware of God being with us. And that’s what prayer really is. It’s our basic way of corresponding to God in our objectively unbreakable and intimate relation with him.

More than just mouthing some vocal prayers, which are also moments of prayer, it’s the moment-to-moment awareness of God’s presence, made alive by referring everything to him—conferring with him, consulting, asking questions or help, etc.—that comprises our prayer.

We also have to overcome the understanding of prayer that considers it as some kind of special and sublime moments with God that rarely come, if at all, in our life. That would make prayer detached from our daily concerns.

It’s unfortunate that many of us still have this kind of understanding about prayer. Prayer has become a very special moment reserved for some extraordinary events and situations, when it should be the very heart beat of our spiritual life that underwrites and supports our natural and human life.

It’s important therefore that in our very consciousness of things, we always include God. Without God, we can say that we are detached from him, from our Creator and Father, and from the source, in fact, of our life in its proper state.

Obviously, this is something that we have to train ourselves in. While the grace of God is always available, we need to correspond to that grace to attain this state of mind and life itself, where we are abidingly aware of God’s presence in us and around us.

This is also what is meant to be a contemplative. We are designed to be that way. To be contemplative is not only for some nuns and other religious and consecrated men and women. It’s meant for all of us!

So, we need to learn to be constantly discerning of God’s presence and, in fact, also of his unfolding providence in our daily life. We have to be wary of our usual and easy tendency to see things only very humanly or naturally, just depending on what we see or feel, or even just what our intelligence can understand.

That way of seeing things restricts us to the externals, to the appearances, and at best to the natural essences of things and the confusing play they make in the different aspects of human life—social, professional, economic, political, etc.

We have to learn to think theologically, that is, to always infuse our senses and thoughts with the truths of our faith. Our thinking should not only be fed and nourished by what are merely sensible and intelligible. It has to be leavened by the truths of faith.

Toward this end, we have to realize the need to discipline our senses, feelings, passions, moods and also our thinking and desiring. We just cannot let them go on their own, unsupervised, so to speak, by the contribution of our faith.

That’s why I recommend spending time to meditate on the truths of our faith, so that these truths can really sink deep in our consciousness and become firm convictions that can give energy, meaning and direction to the different aspects of our life.

Saints have done that, the Church recommends it unceasingly. I think there is no other formula for us to make prayer our life really, and not just an application.