Relational Prayer:

03-19-2017Weekly Reflection

Based on the teachings of The Institute for Priestly Formation

Acknowledge: become aware of, pay attention to, notice, and name my thoughts, feelings, and desires

• It is impossible to grow in relationship with another without first coming to some self-possession. Try to grow in friendship with someone who cannot name their preferences, their likes and dislikes, their opinions, their values or their beliefs. It simply does not work.
• We are invited to encounter God as we are, and acknowledging our thoughts, feelings, and desires is the first necessary dynamic of growing intimacy with the Blessed Trinity.

Relate: Talk to God honestly about the thought, feeling, or desire

• The second fundamental relational dynamic for growing Trinitarian intimacy is to relate what I find in my heart to God, and to do so honestly and consistently.
• Tell God all about it – the good, the bad and the ugly. Entrust what is in the heart to God.
• God does not need a news update, but knows that if we open our hearts to Him in honesty and trust, we will be maximally receptive to what he wants to give.
• It is a huge interior leap to move from awareness of the thoughts, feelings and desires to actually relating them to God.
• Pope Benedict XVI: "in learning how to speak to God, we learn how to be a human being, to be ourselves. To share our hearts with God is what it means to be human, to be in relation with this God who desires us."

Receive: Listen as God communicates Himself to us

• Honest and consistent acknowledging and relating of the movements of the heart will dispose the disciple to receive fully and generously all that God desires to give.
• In reality we are always in a position to receive from God, because we are radically dependent on him for our very being and for every good thing.
• The Blessed Virgin Mary is a great model of fruitful receptivity because she is the first and greatest disciple of Jesus who receives everything from the heavenly Father.
• Pope Benedict XVI: "prayer is pure receptivity to God's grace."
• Fr. Jean Corbon, OP: "…the most fruitful human activity of the human person is to be 'able to receive God.'"
• Pope Benedict XVI: "always expressed in prayer is the truth of the human creature who on the one hand experiences weakness and impoverishment, who therefore addresses his supplication to heaven, and on the other hand is endowed with an extraordinary dignity so that in preparing to receive divine revelation finds himself able to enter into communion with God."

Respond: Respond to what God has communicated

• What we receive from God calls for a response.
• Our response to God must be on the basis of the gift of communion received from him for, as Jesus teaches in the parable of the vine and the branches, "apart from me you can do nothing."
• From the Catechism: "Meditation is above all a quest. The mind seeks to understand the why and how of the Christian life, in order to adhere and respond to what the Lord is asking." (CCC #2705)