God Slot: Praying our life

By Fr Declan Boland

Last Sunday I told the congregation at mass that a priest or minister is not a magician. You cannot expect him to come to the altar any given Sunday, wave a wand and everyone automatically tunes into Jesus!

During the week, people have, through their own prayer lives opened their hearts in prayer and to the same extent will they be open to the unbelievable love mystery which is the eucharist.

We are kidding ourselves if we think we can consistently dismiss daily prayer and still maintain a quality relationship with the Holy One. This is even more important today when our minds are bombarded constantly with data from phones, technology of every kind, noise, busyness and the daily hustle and bustle of life. We cannot manage to process even a small fraction of all the data that is constantly being beamed at us 24/7. We are in danger of becoming a pancake culture, spread wide and thin, with little or no depth!

Prayer opens the space of our inner being so that we can be more sensitive and attentive to the prompting of the Holy Spirit throughout the day. Developing an ability to listen to the Spirit’s movements requires practice. Some people are fearful of silence and seek to fill the space with music, television, conversation, words, anything but utter stillness. When choosing a time and place of prayer, it is helpful to have a quiet area, but this may not be possible in our noisy world. So, instead, we learn to become silent inside our self and pray amid the external noise we can neither quell nor control.

Anthony DeMello, SJ, once remarked, “The present moment is never unbearable if you live it fully. What is unbearable is to have your body here at 10am and your mind at 6pm, your body in Bombay and your mind in San Francisco.”

Our acceptance of the world in which we pray allows us peacefully to be present, to not judge obtrusive sounds like cars honking, dogs barking, loud music blaring, or children at play, as anything other than the sounds of life. Complete silence and solitude, a rested body, an undistracted mind are bonuses for prayer, but we cannot wait until these conditions are fully present before we decide to pray. Who knows but what God may communicate to us in the very things we want to eliminate?

Prayer can happen anywhere, anytime. Not only can we communicate with God in church, and in the solitude of our own room but we can also do so in the midst of life’s activities, whether in the office, a supermarket line, an airport terminal, a laundry room, the bathroom, the bed or stopped at the traffic lights. We do not pray in a vacuum. Always prayer is to touch our life and life is to touch our prayer. Each part of who we are and how we are is what we bring to God.

Of course there are always some pieces of our lives that we’d definitely like to keep from God due to guilt, shame, pride, or an obsessive desire to be perfect. No part of who we are and how we are can be left out, however, because this is where we receive God’s grace. Prayer ought never be separated and strained clean from what is happening in the rest of our life.

Our life experiences are where the Spirit teaches and nurtures us into greater wholeness. This is one reason why it is essential to be aware. Unless we are attuned to life within us and around us, we will miss countless opportunities of how the Spirit is communicating with us. Instead of deleting the external world, we should enter fully into it. We never know what commonplace part of our life may awaken us to God’s presence and shift us towards a deeper place inside. It could be walking in a beautiful autumn day, watching the sea, a sunrise or sunset, falling leaves, falling snow – nothing is commonplace. Everywhere and at any time God is nudging us through the ordinary (extraordinary) events of life.

As we pray out of the ordinariness of our life, reflective pauses help clear our heart and mind so we can recognise how the Spirit moves among us. While morning is an ideal time to begin our day intentionally with God, the closing of the day invites us to reflect back over the hours when we spent since getting out of bed. This last prayer of the day need not be long. We gather up gratitude for what went well since morning and express sorrow for any deliberate unloving acts.

Often, in this brief space of looking back, we will be amazed at the interweaving of God throughout the day’s events. Then we entrust our entire being into the Holy One’s care, peacefully asking that divine light and love fill our entire being.