In a society that seems to be filled with urgencies and
emergencies, prayer appears to be an unnatural form of behavior. Without fully realizing it, we have accepted
the idea that “doing things” is more important than prayer and have come to
think of prayer as something for times when there is nothing urgent to do…
Concentrated human effort is necessary because prayer is not
our most natural response to the world.
Left to our own impulses, we will always want to do something else
before we pray. Often, what we want to
do seems so unquestionably good – setting up a religious education program,
helping with a soup kitchen, listening to people’s problems, visiting the sick,
planning the liturgy, working with prisoners or mental patients – that it is
hard to realize that even these things can be done with impatience and so
become signs of our own needs rather than of God’s compassion.
Therefore, prayer is in many ways the criterion of Christian
life. Prayer requires that we stand in
God’s presence with open hands, naked and vulnerable, proclaiming to ourselves
and to others that without God we can do nothing. This is difficult in a climate where the
predominate counsel is, “Do your best and God will do the rest.” When life is divided into “our best” and “God’s
rest”, we have turned prayer into a last resort to be used only when all our
resources are depleted. Then even the
Lord has become the victim of our impatience.
Discipleship does not mean to use God when we can no longer function
ourselves. On the contrary, it means to
recognize that we can do nothing at all, but that God can do everything through
us. As disciples, we find not some but
all of our strength, hope, courage, and confidence in God. Therefore, prayer must be our first concern.
God’s way can only be grasped in prayer. The more you listen to God speaking within
you, the sooner you will hear that voice inviting you to follow the way of
Jesus. For Jesus’ way is God’s way, and
God’s way is not for Jesus only, but for everyone who is truly seeking
God. Here we come up against the hard
truth that the descending way of Jesus is also the way for us to find God. Soon after he ends his fasting in the
wilderness and calls his first disciples, Jesus says,
How
blessed are the poor in spirit…
Blessed
are the gentle…
Blessed
are those who mourn…
Blessed
are those who hunger and thirst for uprightness…
Blessed
are the merciful…
Blessed
are the pure in heart…
Blessed
are the peacemakers…
Blessed
are those who are persecuted in the cause of uprightness…
Jesus is drawing a self-portrait here and inviting his
disciples to become like him.
Prayer means letting Jesus’ way of the cross, his way of downward
mobility, truly become our way. And
prayer means listening with attentive, undivided hearts, to the inner movements
of the Spirit of Jesus, even when that Spirit leads us to places we would
rather not go…I say this with great compassion: we are living in an upwardly mobile society, a society in which making it to the top is expected in some degree of all of us. And aren’t we tempted to use even the Word of God to help us in this upward mobility? But this is not the way of God. The question we will finally hear is not going to be: “How much did you earn in your lifetime?” or “How many friends did you make?” or “How much progress did you make in your career?” No, the question for us will be: “What did you do for the least of mine?” God has chosen to be revealed in a crucified humanity. That is a very hard realization to come to, yet all authentic prayer will eventually lead us to it.
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