Regular prayer changes our lives. Prayer confronts our blind spots. The nature of deep personal prayer draws us out of comfortable illusions and self-deceptions.
Hearing God’s word and obeying God’s will are the productive part in prayer. This leads us out of self-centeredness. Authentic prayer always upgrades the quality of our life.
Here are a few examples of this inward transformation. Many families are caught in the trap of a destructively addicted member. Everyone suffers. AL ANON offers relief but it comes at a price of self-knowledge and personal change. One needs to lose the illusion of control. It also challenges two patterns: denial and/or being a victim. The simple acceptance that one cannot change another person comes slowly and with personal sacrifice. The change in attitude, however, is life-giving and liberating. This is the sort of thing that God is always surfacing in our prayer: movement from death to life, from illusion to reality. It is the result of accepting gospel values
In the early 80’s, already a priest for twenty years, I was confronted about my blatant prejudice against homosexuals. I fought it. I rejected it. I became angry but I prayed. Eventually, I began a journey to acceptance and repentance.
What is common in both examples, one personal and the other social or cultural, is that a matter is brought to our awareness but we resist it. However, it is now in play. If we pray regularly, we have to work hard to avoid it. The change evolving from our “hearing and obeying” of prayer is the encounter of our being with God’s word and will. This means personal transformation when we are open and accepting of God’s call. The message of the gospel is sown in our heart. These seeds of new life are always looking for the opportunity to blossom. This is the goal of prayer: to create a new heart in the image of Jesus Christ. It is a gradual passage from self-absorption to self-giving.
Teresa of Avila’s map of the spiritual journey is quite clear. It is a relentless movement to the center where God dwells. Prayer leads to a growing awareness of God calling us out of our selfishness to the loving presence that is our deepest truth. The ticket for this is self-discovery. Prayer is what makes this possible.
Teresa of Avila’s Message of Acceptance
For Teresa, the “practice of prayer” was the serious pursuit of God. This involves all of our life. Teresa’s deliverance from mediocrity was the simple acceptance of reality. “Be not afraid” or similar wording, appears as a Scripture verse over three hundred times in the Bible. It always reveals a sense of God’s loving providence and presence.
Teresa understood this loving providence as the foundation of reality. It is the center of her message in her famous bookmark prayer. The prayer is an invitation into the mystery of God’s loving presence. It invites us to accept life as it is. For Teresa, life’s experience draws us into God’s love. Life is the greatest grace. Jesus revealed this power of acceptance when he prayed in the Garden, “Not my will, but thy will be done.” (Lk 22:42)
Letting go and letting God in a surrender of accepting our life situation is a centerpiece of Teresa’s message. This evolves from a single-minded growth in our spiritual maturity. Most of us have a long way to go. We need to continue the struggle. We can only make our way one step at a time.
This acceptance does not make us robots. We have responsibility to live life to the full with integrity and authenticity. We do this by developing our talents. We need to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible and loving. Eventually, we will confront the arbitrariness and dark side of reality beyond our control: sickness, inequality, prejudice, fractured relationships and countless other dimensions of life that we just cannot cut and paste to resolve the problem. We slowly learn that the problems are not the problem. The issue is how we respond to the problems. This is the essential role of acceptance.
Teresa’s prayer is an invitation to get real, to be open to life in all its brokenness and limits as well as its beauty and wonder. This is where we encounter God not in the illusions and deceptions of our self-centered heart, but in God’s loving and merciful providence.
