What do I need to do to pray more deeply?

There are many moments in life when God plays peek-a-boo with us. We see things clearly and often  powerfully where we have a special awareness of God’s presence. This can be a moment of great joy or sorrow, an encounter with nature, a profound experience of love. These are informal but awesome moments of prayer.

I want to give a description of beginning a journey of a more formal and systematic approach to prayer.

A good place to start is eith the parable of the lost treasure. There are three steps in this parable: finding, selling and buying.

“The finding” comes from a sense of hunger in the depths of the heart, a sense of incompleteness, a sense that there is more to life than what I have. Carmelite spirituality builds on the central Gospel truth that God loves us first and loves us as we are. The “finding” we experience is rooted in this initiating love of God for us in our brokeness.

Likewise, we believe but seldom give much credence or attention to the fact that God is at the deepest and most real part of our being. God is the center. True prayer will draw us into an encounter with this center.

The “selling” involves making a commitment to pray. This costs us our convenience, time and comfort. Making time, generating a schedule, building an atmosphere and discovering and practicing a method of prayer all come at a cost: self-sacrifice. What we are doing is making a space for God at a crescendoing surrender to God’s terms. In the process we gradually learn God always wants more in her love for us.

The “buying” brings us to the practice of prayer in a regular and disciplined part of out lifestyle. There are many methods of prayer. I am going to present one.

However, whatever method we eventually use there are a few important points to form a helpful ambience. First of all, we need to ve aware of who it is we are encountering. This brings us to a sense of the sacred in our effort. Secondly, prayer always has to be rooted in love responding to love. Thirdly, prayer needs to come from a heart yearning for faithfulness to love not the right ideas. In prayer insight is important but it is always trumped by love.

The most common method of prayer is called Lectio Divina which literally means a divine reading. All the other methods flow in some way from this foundational process.

The first step is to read. Most often this is the Holy Scriptures but it may also be spiritual reading or even some powerful experience in our life.

In the second step we reflect and ponder the text trying to make a connection to our life. Here we encounter the tremendous challenge of fighting off the distractions. They are relentless. The key is the discipline to return to the text to regain focus.

The third step leads us to respond in prayer. We desire to talk about our hunger to know God better and to change our life accordingly.

Finally, eith fidelity to porayer we reach a point of simply being in the silent presence of our loving God. Silence is the language of God. This is the contemplative moment.

Thomas Merton, the great spiritual force of the American church in the 20th century, had this definition of prayer: prayer is yearning to be aware of the presence of God, a personal understanding of God’s word, knowledge of God’s will and the capacity to hear and obey.

There are five points of importance in this definition of prayer as an invitacion to a deeper encounter with God.

• 1. We desire an awareness of the presence of God. This is a movement to the center.


• 2. We seek knowledge of God’s word. This is both the Bible and our life experience, and most preeminently, Jesus Christ.


• 3. We want to do God’s will which emerges out of the darkness with the light of our encounter with God’s word.


• 4. We long for the capacity to hear the call of God anew at this precise moment.


• 5. Then we have the task of living the word. We do this in the context of this moment in time. We embrace our present reality in all dimensions. Prayer leads us to move from our static space to the next step on our journey with Jesus Christ.

A true understanding of Merton’s call to prayer will lead us to see prayer in a new way. Prayer’s importance is related to how we live not how we feel. Most often, God gives beginners at prayer a sense of peace and progress. Gradually God weans us form  the beautiful feelings to sharpen our focus away from ourselves and towards God. We need to hunger for the God of consolations and not the consolations of God. This will be an ongoing battle for all who are serious about prayer.

The road from the understanding of God’s word and knowledge of God’s will to the capacity to hear and obey is filled with an obstacle course called self-knowledge. The purpose of prayer is to draw us out of a world of self-deception, illusions and a sense of self-grandiosity that places us at the center of our consciousness. The slow, lifetime process of growing in self-knowledge is a gradual sequencer of personal transformation called conversion. It is repeated at several levels. The journey to refocus and recognize God at the center is only possible when we acknowledge our sinfulness and pettiness. Generally it is not a joyful part of our passage. Another name for it is getting real.
  
Teresa of Avila says the path of self-knowledge and its sister, humility, must never be abandoned. * This includes the highest forms of prayer as well as the critical component of a beginners’s prayer*
  
With faithfulness to prayer we slowly grow in patience. The possibilities of reconciliation come out nowhere. Situations where it was difficult to see the other side of a story now often open up to four or five different valid points of view. The prejudices of a lifetime get exposed for exactly what they are, a lie.

All of this, and so much more, are the benefits of self-knowledge and humility blossoming out of a life of faithfulness to prayer.