We desire to
pray because we were created by Love. When we are in love, we desire to
contemplate, we think about our lover all the time. This is a form of prayer. It is in our
instinct, or as the great doctor of our Church, Thomas Aquinas said, it is a
natural desire (natural law) which is imprinted within each one of us. God
leads us to pray through his compassion for us, and he never condemns us nor
forces us against our will to have a relationship with him. Through his mercy
he allows us to see how little we are in comparison to everything, and yet we
are an essential and unique part of something larger. In God’s creation everyone and everything
belongs; light and dark; victim and victor; sin and grace; life and death; good
and evil.
We fall to
our knees when recognize ourselves and who we really are; what we are capable
of. In our realization of our human
condition, we may weep and lament. These are tears of grace and these tears point
out our journey. I am learning to understand through prayer that my tears are a
sign of God’s presence. It is through my
tears while in prayer that I have learned to love, to be loved, to forgive, and
to be forgiven.
Jesus is the beginning of our
journey of transformation. Often we may
cling to guideposts along our journey, but we realize that our journey is to be
in constant conversion. We must be aware
of our tendency to want to “settle in” or become too comfortable with our
guideposts; this tendency becomes an obstacle for us. Jesus shows us that he is an entry gate to
some place, He as our Messiah points us to our eternal destination. Do we realize that he was all about a process
of transformation more than he was concerned with a belonging system? Jesus affirms wherever we are on our
journey, reminding us that when we understand the greatest commandment (Mk. 12:34)
we may not be far from the kingdom of God. Jesus encourages us to search for
God, not to settle for guideposts, as they in of themselves are not the
destination. When we become seekers of
God-it leads us to prayer.
Let’s remember too, God does not
love us because of anything we did, he loves us because He is good. My favorite
quote is “God loved us first.” Before I existed, he loved me into being. This understanding changed everything for me.
I can’t earn his love but I can surrender into it. We can’t lose it
either. We are today, on our life long
conversion journey, because we are aware of this and we desire to enjoy God’s
love. When we don’t let go our life
becomes a serious of obstacles, but upon surrendering and trusting in God our
life is transformed from fear of God to love of God. This is prayer, an active and willful
surrender to God. When we can honestly say, “your will Lord, not my own”, then
we are praying.
I can fool myself very easily by saying
“I love Jesus”, and yet avoid what he is asking me to do. That is not prayer my
friends. Prayer is more than knowing Jesus...Prayer
leads us deeper into areas of our soul that allows God’s kingdom to be present
right now. Jesus taught us to pray…”thy kingdom
come on earth as it is in heaven”. God can
and does enter our world if we surrender to him.
God led me
back through his compassion towards my soul, never by condemnation, I had
condemned myself. When I encountered Jesus the Christ I found my heavenly Father who had
already forgiven me for not having surrendered sooner. I found a loving Father
who had been touched by my lamentations, who had cried with me, suffered for
me, and loved me anyway. He had heard
everyone one of my prayers.
Praying is
dangerous, because it takes us to God space, and it transforms us if we allow
it. A prayerful heart requires openness, honesty, humility and discipline. Jesus is our example on how to pray. Prayer is powerful stuff.
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