Personal and abiding prayer

A COMMON complaint people have with respect to their duty

to pray is that they have hardly anything to consider during their

prayer. “I have nothing to say and neither do I hear anything in my

prayer. I just go blank and empty and bored.” That’s what some people,

especially the young, say.

  

            I usually tell them that I also feel that way many times

in my prayer, but rather than do nothing about it, I consider the

predicament a challenge. My prayer may feel like I am just crawling in

some dark hole, but I crawl just the same until I get to see some

light and to breathe quite freely.

  

            It’s important that our prayer is considered as necessary

and indispensable as breathing. This is how to make prayer very

personal and abiding. Short of that, it’s very understandable to deem

prayer as a useless burden.

             But we actually never run out of material for prayer. The

very feeling of boredom and helplessness is a very fertile ground for

prayer to grow. If we would react to this predicament with humility,

that’s when we can easily become intimate and sincere with God, and

prayer can spontaneously start.

  

            Actually, with just a little effort, we can already pray.

For sure, we will always have some plans and intentions that we can

pray for. They can be something personal, or related to the family,

our work, our relations with others.

  

            And then we can start to be concerned with bigger things,

like the issues in politics, business and the economy, society and the

world in general and the Church herself.

  

            We should try our best to train ourselves to be interested

in others and in things. It’s when we run out of this interest that

our prayer also would run out of steam. This will require effort and

discipline, but it would all be worthwhile.

             We have to be wary of our tendency to simply think of our

own selves, for that will surely lead us to a dead end insofar as

material for prayer is concerned. These days, we have to do conscious

effort to fight against the continuing bombardment of distractions,

like the games and other things, that undermine our desire for prayer.

  

            What can also help is to sit down for a while and make a

plan of how to do our prayer. Definitely, we need to have some topics

ready, as well as the appropriate materials like books. We can list

down the intentions to pray for.

  

            We also need to choose the appropriate time and place for

our prayer. And definitely, we have to work on the proper

dispositions. In this regard, it is important that we continually

reinforce our faith, and enrich it with other acts of piety, like

making little acts of mortification and penance.

  

            To sustain our life of prayer, we should avoid relying

only on some spontaneous reasons to pray. Our prayer life should bank

on solid convictions. This is how we can pray in all seasons, fair or

foul. This is how our prayer would become very personal and abiding.