Souls of prayer

We really need to be souls of prayer. This is what is proper to us. It’s a fundamental need because when we pray we connect ourselves with our ultimate life source who is God. Our need for prayer is infinitely more than our need for air and food. Before anything else, it is what truly makes us a human person and a child of God.

That is why Christ preached abundantly about it, and encouraged us always to pray. He himself, who is both God and man, prayed all the time. He prayed before he started his public life, when he began his day of work as well as at the end of the day, when he performed miracles, when he had to make big decisions.

In the end, he clearly told us to pray always and not to lose heart when he talked about the parable of the persistent widow. (cfr Lk 18,1ff) He also told us about the basic characteristics of our prayer—that it should be sincere, confident, humble and constant.

We have to be wary of our great tendency to be dominated by worldly and temporal concerns such that we fail to pray. That would be a disaster since that would be like being deluded that we are doing well in life when in fact we are failing big time.

We have to start to pick up the rudiments of prayer and begin the process of becoming authentic souls of prayer, such that wherever we are, whatever situation we may be in, somehow we are always praying, we are always in touch with God.

This should not be difficult because we know that God is always around. He is everywhere. Besides, he is always solicitous of us. He cannot fail to love us. We may fail him and earn his anger, but that anger would only be for a while, since his mercy is forever. We can always manage to pray any time any place if we just would have the proper disposition.

Definitely, we need to exercise our faith and be willing to exert effort and make sacrifices. That is how we can aspire to make our prayer alive always. We should put ourselves in God’s presence always so we avoid anonymity in our intimate conversations with him.

What can also help is to train and use our imagination in our prayer. In fact, we have to use all our human powers and faculties—our intelligence and will, our feelings and memory, etc.—in our prayer.

And we should be ready to handle the unavoidable difficulties in our prayer. There will be times when we would feel dry and uninspired or when we would be tempted to think that our prayer is going nowhere.

Those difficulties are actually opportunities to improve our prayer and to grow in our spiritual life. If we persevere in praying, using all the means that are always available, we will see how this improvement and growth are taking place, and be filled with joy and satisfaction.