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.

Morning offering

WHAT a difference a small act can do! I am referring to

that practice of making a morning offering as soon as we get up from

bed in the morning. It’s what saints and many other people have been

doing to set the proper human and supernatural tone to their daily

affairs, giving them a sense of direction and purpose for the day.

  

            It’s usually done by greeting God as soon as one wakes up.

The effort to give the first thought of the day to God is all

worthwhile since it corresponds to the fundamental reality that our

life is always, from beginning to end, a shared life with God, our

Father, Creator, Savior, Sanctifier, yes, our everything.

             Our life, of course, can be described in many, endless

ways. It's a shared life with God. It's a life in the Spirit, a life

of grace. It's a participation in the intimate Trinitarian life of

God. But we have to remember that we have been created in love and for

love, and that love should be the basic governing principle of our

life.

  

            In other words, our life has to mirror the life of God

himself, whose image and likeness we are. Since God is love, is

self-giving, then we too have to live in love and in self-giving.

             That means giving ourselves to God and to others. That's

what an offering is, what a gift is. It has to be given away freely,

because as our Christian faith tells us, it's when we give that we

receive, when we lose that we win, when we suffer that we gain in

glory.

             It's a mysterious law, spiritual and supernatural, that

goes way beyond our natural understanding of things, or our common

sense. But that's how it is. We need to live by that law, because

outside of it, we expose ourselves to danger, to harm and to our own

destruction.

  

            In fact, given the temper of the times when we are almost

systematically subjected to pressures and challenges, to moments of

thrill and sadness, we need to have a very clear grasp of this basic

law, otherwise we would just be lost. We have a greater need now to

develop and maintain a supernatural outlook in life.

  

            After greeting God, which we can do by saying ‘Serviam’ (I

will serve), for example, we can start going through the expected

different events of the day that we are going to have.

  

            We can start figuring out how we can offer each event,

each concern, project, etc., to God. We can start figuring out how we

can sanctify them and how they can produce apostolic fruits, since all

these things are not meant to be tackled technically only. They are

actually occasions to develop our love for God and for others.

             In this way, we can start the day on the right foot. We

would be less prone to getting distracted, and much less, confused and

lost, and in the words of St. Paul, “tossed to and fro, and carried

about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning

craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.” (Eph 4,14)

             We have to devise plans and strategies to keep our

supernatural bearing all throughout the day. Thus, the initial

offering we make as we wake up in the morning ought to be renewed

frequently as the day progresses. We have need for different acts of

piety, spread in the different parts of the day, to keep ourselves

going spiritually and supernaturally.

  

            It would be great if we can encourage everyone to develop

this habit of making morning offerings.

Imparting Christ’s mercy to all

WITH the celebration of the Second Sunday as well as the

Octave of Easter that happens also to be the Divine Mercy Sunday, we

are reminded of our duty to know how to dispense Christ’s mercy to

all. It’s truly an overwhelming task since it requires nothing less

that our vital union with Christ. It requires our assuming his mind

and heart that is full of mercy.

  

            What may console us is the fact that as this Sunday’s

gospel reassures us (cfr. Jn 20,19-31), it is Christ who will take the

initiative, the first move, to come and appear to us. Ours simply is

to welcome him and to learn as much as we can from him.

  

            That may create some problem because in spite of

everything that Christ has already done and given to us, we can still

be like the doubting Thomas who needed a direct vision of Christ’s

wounds in his hands and side. Christ had to reprimand him: “Have you

come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have

not seen and have believed.”

  

            We somehow have to understand that the words addressed by

Christ directly to the apostles are also meant for all of us in ways

that depend on our state in life and personal circumstances: “As the

Father has sent me, so I send you.” And this sending can only mean, in

the end, imparting Christ mercy to all, since that would be the

ultimate sign of our redemption.

  

            We need to know what is involved in imparting this divine

mercy. Yes, for this purpose we have to study well the doctrine of our

faith and morals, now authoritatively taught by the Church

magisterium. We need to be generous with our time and effort so that

that divine mercy can be readily given to everyone.

            This way we can hope to be father, a friend, a judge and a

doctor to the others insofar as their spiritual and moral lives are

concerned.

  

            More than that, we really should pray so that we can see

more directly and reflect in our attitudes, our thoughts, words and

deeds the very passion, death and resurrection of Christ which in the

end is the very substance of divine mercy.

  

            The ideal situation is that we be filled with holy desires

to ask for forgiveness, to atone and make reparation for our sins and

the sins of others. It’s a mindset that we have to deliberately

cultivate, always getting inspiration from the example of Christ

himself.

             I wonder if our idea of what Christian life ought to be

includes this very important factor. Until we have these desires to

dispense divine mercy to others can we sincerely say that we are truly

Christian, another Christ if not Christ himself, as we ought to be.

             In our daily examination of conscience, let us try to see

if we have been doing something concrete in this regard. Are we

willing to bear the sins of others, in an effort to reflect Christ’s

attitude toward all of us who are all sinners?