Talk to God

WE have to overcome our doubt, fear or mere awkwardness to talk to God. It is a prime duty of ours to do so, since God is everything to us. Nothing true, good and beautiful happens without talking to God. Nothing exists without him. And even in our worst situations, we still can talk to God.

            That’s because God is the very foundation of reality, whether it is the reality that still maintains its original goodness or is already spoiled by our sins. In the latter case, God through his Son and now in the Holy Spirit through the many instrumentalities now made available to us, shows us how to get to the essential goodness of things.

            It’s always possible to talk to God. It’s just a matter of exercising our faith, the faith that is first of all a gift from God to us, his first gift to enable us to start sharing his life, which is what is proper to us.

            For this to happen, we need to strengthen our conviction that we are meant more to believe than just to reason out. Our reasoning, our intelligence is always in need of an object for it to get activated. And in the face of an object, a reality that is simply mysterious and even supernatural, we need to believe, to make an act or leap of faith.

            Faith does not stifle, and much less, kills reason. Quite the contrary, faith enhances our reason. It expands reason’s scope and range. It enriches and deepens reason’s understanding of things. It is what makes reason acquire wisdom.

            Faith gives reason proper light and path to proceed. Otherwise, reason can just go anywhere, including in ways that would do damage to it, although they appear to be very reasonable, practical and convenient.

            But faith also shows reason’s limitations. First of all, faith tells reason that reason is not self-generated at all. Reason is not self-created. Reason comes from God and is always subject to God’s laws for it. Reason cannot be simply on its own, following laws that simply are its own making.

            We need to learn to talk to God all the time. Given our weakened condition, we have to make deliberate effort to be able to do this. We need to get beyond the confines of our material, earthly and temporal dimensions to enter into the spiritual, celestial and eternal aspects of our life.

            This is not an easy task to do. A certain discipline is needed, a discipline that hopefully will become so part of us, like a second nature to us, that it develops into an abiding and life-giving and direction-setting spirituality for us.

            We need to convince ourselves that this aspiration is not just for some special people. It is meant for all of us, whether we are the intellectual type or of the blue-collar kind. That’s why we have to understand everyone, whatever may be our differences, faults, mistakes, as well as our accomplishments, etc.

            To talk to God meaningfully, we may have to spend time meditating on his words, on his life, on his doctrines that are now articulated more explicitly and with God-given authority by the Church magisterium.

            We have to find time for this, since God actually has always something to say about anything and everything in our life. We have to explode the myth that there are things in our life where God has nothing to say.

            In fact, not only does he talk and offer mere words and ideas to us. He offers nothing less than himself, especially in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven,” he said. “If any man eats of this bread, he shall live forever, and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life the world.” (Jn 6,51)

            For sure, these words are not easy to digest, but neither are they impossible to accept and believe in. With an act of faith, we just allow ourselves to swim in an ocean of mystery into which we are thrown. Let the unknown and the ungraspable in the mystery be the very reason to stay put and to trust in God’s loving and merciful providence.

            Our ultimate lot, without compromising our God-given powers, is to abandon ourselves in the hands of God. In fact, this should be our constant attitude that is activated by learning to talk to God continually.

            That way, our sense of abandonment would not lead us to loneliness, but to a most reassuring company.