Corpus Christi Blog

Excerpts from: Prayer: A Personal Response to God’s Presence

03-12-2017Weekly ReflectionArmand M. Nigro, S.J.

The single most important conviction I want to share with you is that Prayer is a Personal Response to God's Presence.

May I try to explain this?

Either you and I are more important than God, or God is more important than we are. The answer is obvious, isn't it? He is more important than we are. Further if what God wants and does is more important than what we want or do, then more of our attention should be focused on what God is and does. Again, what God wants to say to us is more important for us than anything we may have to say to Him. And God does want tospeak and communicate Himself to us.

When prayer becomes too self-centered, even if it is centered upon noble and holy desires, if the focus of ourprayer is I, me, or my, you're going to be in difficulty.

Prayers is a personal response to God's presence. This means that God first makes Himself present to us. Prayer is our awareness and acknowledgement of God's presence. It is what God does to us, rather than anything we do. St. John reminds us that genuine love means first of all not that we love God (which may or may not be true), but that God first loves us. His love for us is more important than our love for him, his love deservesmore of our attention.

What God does is more important than what we do. And God longs to communicate Himself to us. The tragedy is that so few of us permit God to communicate Himself to us in prayer. One reason for this failure is faulty teaching or education in prayer. A second is lack of trust or faith that He really wants to and is going to communicate Himself personally and uniquely to us. Since we feel uncertain about this, we do most or all of the talking or meditating, or fill in the time with spiritual reading or something "profitable;" but we are reluctant to empty ourselves and abandon ourselves to his presence in movement so that in silence he can communicate himself to us the way he prefers.

A third reason is that we are afraid of failing, afraid of trying this kind of prayer and finding out that it doesn't work for us. It will always work, if you remove obstacles and give God a chance, because God loves to communicate himself to each of us personally. He wants to make our prayer more and more mystical. And this is not in any dangerous, quietististic, way-out, extraordinary sense. God wants us to be normal, ordinary, every day mystics. By mystic, I mean the sort of person who opens up to God's presence, who lets God fill his consciousness with His presence. The older we grow in our prayer life, the more aware, sensitive, attuned, docile, responsive to God's presence we become; because all genuine prayer is a personal response to that presence.

All growth in prayer, then, is rooted in our conviction that God is present to us, that His presence is personal, loving and provident, uniquely saturating us; that God is and wants more and more to be our father and that like every good father, God wants to speak and communicate with us. He keeps trying to speak to us through all the experiences of our life, through his Church, through His living word in Holy Scripture, through his Eternal Word Jesus Christ, in whose Holy Spirit we are invited to be sons and daughters. God, I repeat, longsto communicate himself to us and he invites us to listen and to receive. But He will not force this on us.

A note from Fr. Chad:
It takes effort to truly learn to recognize God's voice. Next week, I will give a practical way to grow in this relational prayer, with these four steps of relational prayer: ARRR. If we practice these daily, they will greatly enhance our personal relationships with God and help us to do all things with Him and in Him. I hope it is as helpful for you as it is for me.

BACK TO LIST