Personal Prayer

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“‘How can you sleep?’ he asked. ‘Rise up and pray, so that you may not enter into temptation’” (Luke 22:46).

There are many passages in the Gospel speaking about how Our Lord had withdrawn from the crowds and gone on His own to pray (Matt. 14:23; Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16, etc.).

And that’s more clearly thrown into relief at the more important moments of His public ministry: at His Baptism (Luke 3:21-22); at the election of the apostles (Luke 6:12-15); on the occasion of the first multiplication of the loaves (Mark 6:46); at the Transfiguration (Luke 9:28-29). It was a normal thing for Jesus to do.

St. Josemaría says, “At times he spent the whole night in an intimate conversation with his Father. The apostles were filled with love when they saw Christ pray” (Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 119).

Before giving Himself in the Passion, Our Lord makes for the Garden of Gethsemane with His apostles. Our Lord must often have prayed there, because, St. Luke says, “Now he went out, as his custom was, to Mount Olivet (Luke 22:39).

But this time His prayer would be special because the moment of His agony had arrived.

When He comes to Gethsemane, He says to them: “Pray that you may not enter into temptation” (Luke 22:40). Before withdrawing a little to pray, Our Lord asked the Apostles too to pray.

He knows that they soon would be subjected to the temptation of scandal on seeing the Master taken captive. He had already announced it at the Last Supper; but now He warns them that unless they're found vigilant and praying, they will not pass the test.

Prayer is indispensable for us, for if we neglect our dealings with God, little by little our spiritual life begins to languish.

In the Furrow we’re told, “If you abandon prayer you may at first live on spiritual reserves…and after that, by cheating (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 445).

Bishop Sheen likes to say, “No one ever fell away from God without neglecting their prayer” (Fulton J. Sheen, Characters of the Passion: Lessons on Faith and Trust).

On the other hand, prayer unites us to God. He tells us, “Without me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

It is good, said St. Luke, to pray with perseverance, never vacillating (cf. Luke 18:1).

We have to speak with Him a great deal, insistently, in the various circumstances of our lives.

Now, moreover, we walk with Jesus along the Way of the Cross. In The Way, Point 89, we're told, “without prayer, how difficult it is to accompany him.”

With the example of His own life, the Lord teaches us what our fundamental approach has to be: a continuous filial dialogue with God.

St. Teresa of Ávila has said, “In my view, mental prayer is nothing more but friendly dialogue and frequent solitary conversation with him whom we know loves us” (St. Teresa, Life).

We have to try always to be in the presence of God and to contemplate the mysteries of our faith. This dialogue with God should not be interrupted, and even further, should be carried out in the midst of all our activities.

There are certain periods of the liturgical year when it should be even more intense; in a period of the day, even more intense, during mental prayer: we meditate, we speak in His presence, knowing that He truly sees us and hears us—“that you see me, that you hear me” (Prayer Before Meditation).

The need for prayer, together with the importance of charity, is one of the points most stressed by Our Lord in His public ministry.

“Then he parted from them, and going a stone’s throw-off, he knelt down to pray. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘if it pleases you, take this chalice from before me; only as your will is, not as mine is’” (Luke 22:41-42).

When His spiritual suffering was so intense that it led Him to agony, Our Lord turns to His Father with a prayer brimming with confidence.

He calls Him Abba, “Father,” and says intimate things to Him. This is the way that we also should adopt.

In our lives there will be moments of spiritual peace and others of more intense struggle, some moments perhaps of darkness and others of profound sorrow, with temptations to discouragement.

But the sight of Jesus in the Garden always points to the way that we have to proceed—with a persevering and confident prayer.

To move along the road to holiness, but especially when we feel the weight of our weaknesses, we have to recollect ourselves in prayer, in an intimate conversation with Our Lord.

Public prayer, or prayer in common, in which all the faithful take part, is holy and necessary, for God wishes also to see His children praying together (Matt. 18:19-20).

But Our Lord's commandment to us to “go into your inner room and shut the door upon yourself, and so pray to your Father in secret” (Matt. 6:6) should never be superseded.

The document on the liturgy of the Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, says the liturgy is public prayer par excellence: “it is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; it is also the fount from which all her power flows. …

“The spiritual life, however, is not limited solely to participation in the liturgy. The Christian indeed is called to pray with others, but he or she must also ‘enter into their chamber to pray to the Father in secret’ (Matt. 6:6); furthermore, according to St. Paul, they must ‘pray without ceasing’” (1 Thess. 5:17).

Prayer in company with other Christians ought also to be personal prayer; while the lips recite it at the proper pace and pauses, the mind gives it all her attention.

In prayer one speaks with God just as one converses with a friend—knowing that He is present, always attentive to what we are saying, listening to us, and replying. It is in such intimate conversation as the one that we are just now trying to have with God.

In these meditations we're not just listening to a priest speaking. Hopefully we're taking His words, making them our own, and directing them in a very personal way to Christ, to Jesus.

A priest doesn't do your prayer for you. It's your own raising up of the mind and heart to God. We have to try and work at our prayer to improve it all the time.

In that prayer, we throw our soul open to the Lord, to adore Him, to give Him thanks, to ask Him for help, and to go more deeply—as the apostles did—into the divine teachings. “Did not our hearts burn within us as he opened the Scriptures to us as we walked along the way?” (Luke 24:32).

As Our Lord opens the Scriptures to us and shows us new lights in the Scriptures, or in this event, or that event, or in our family, or in our work, hopefully we will continue to see new lights, new beginnings, that will draw us on into a deeper prayer and become more and more convinced of the importance and of the value of this activity.

In The Way, Point 91, we're told, “You write: ‘To pray is to talk with God. But about what?’ About him, about yourself: joys, sorrows, successes and failures, noble ambitions, daily worries, weaknesses! And acts of thanksgiving and petitions, and love and reparation. In a word, it's worth getting to know him and to get to know yourself: ‘to get acquainted.’”

We could ask Our Lord for that grace to yearn to spend time with Him in prayer, and to thank Him for the grace that He has given to us in the past, maybe, years or decades of our life, where He has given us the grace of prayer.

Millions of people in the world have not been given that grace, and so it's a talent we have to try and use well.

Our prayer ought never to be impersonal, anonymous, dispersed and lost in the crowd; because God, who has redeemed each individual person wants to maintain a dialogue with each one: at the end of one's life, salvation or condemnation will depend on the personal response of each one.

Prayer ought to be the dialogue of a particular person—one who has ideals, a specific job, specific friends, who has received specific graces from God, and wants to talk with his God about all of these things.

“When he rose from prayer, he went back to his disciples and found they were sleeping for sorrow. Our Lord said, ‘How can you sleep? Rise up and pray, so that you may not enter into temptation’” (Luke 22:45-46).

The apostles had ignored Our Lord's command. There may be many times in our life when we have been like the apostles. Possibly Our Lord has told us specific things, or things He wants us to do, or jobs to fulfill, or people to speak to.

Like the apostles, we've ignored His command. He may have told us those things through people, through places, through events, through spiritual direction, through means of formation, but somehow the penny didn't drop; the message didn't penetrate.

Our Lord had left them there, close to Himself, so that they would watch and pray, and so not fall into temptation.

But they’ve been negligent. Even now, they don't love Him enough and they allow themselves to be overcome by sleep and weakness, leaving Our Lord unaccompanied, alone, during that time of His agony.

If ever find we're overcome with the temptation to sleep, to get drowsy during our prayer, we could try and learn from this situation of the apostles.

See, ‘What can I do to stay more awake? Can I kneel down, can I walk around the place? Can I do my mental prayer walking around? Do I need some sort of book, so I can look at certain topics or lines from time to time?’

In mental prayer, the focus is on talking with Our Lord. We glance at a line or two to help that conversation. In spiritual reading, our reading is continual reading, but in mental prayer, the reading of a few points is meant to facilitate our prayer.

Sleep, which is like the epitome of human weakness, has allowed an evil sadness to take hold of them: lack of spiritual struggle, abandonment of a life of piety.

There are lessons there for us about the importance of what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “the battle for prayer” (Catechism, Point 2725).

Occasionally in our life, we may all experience the battle for prayer. We shouldn't expect that we can drift into our prayer as on a cloud every time we go to do our mental prayer.

Sometimes we might have to drag ourselves to pray. Or we might feel that our prayer is a comedy show, or we're getting nothing out of it.

But St. Josemaría is very encouraging about those moments. He says, “Persevere in that prayer” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 101).

That prayer might be the best prayer you ever did because that prayer is all done for God and there are no human compensations.

If we maintain a living dialogue with God during each period of prayer, we will avoid getting into the situation of the apostles.

We will frequently resort to the Gospels or some other book that helps us to pray so that it can help us to channel our dialogue, to come closer to Our Lord, for whom no one or nothing can be a substitute. This is the way many saints have been made.

“During all those years,” says St. Teresa of Ávila, ‘except for after Communicating, I never dared begin to pray without a book; my soul was as much afraid to engage in prayer without one, as if it were having to go and fight against a host of enemies. With this help, which was a companion to me and a shield with which I could fight off the many blows of my many thoughts, I felt comforted” (St. Teresa of Ávila, Life).

It is really encouraging to know how the saints had to fight that battle for prayer.

We have to try and use all the means at our disposal to do our mental prayer in a recollected way. We should do it in the best place, according to our circumstances; and, whenever possible, in front of Our Lord in the tabernacle.

It should be done at the time we have already planned in our schedule for the normal day.

In the prayer we will always be on our guard against distractions. To a large extent, this can mean mortifying our memory and the imagination, keeping distant whatever may impede our attentiveness to God.

We have to avoid having “our senses awake and our soul asleep” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 368).

If we fight earnestly against temptations, Our Lord will make it easy for us to take up again the threads of our dialogue with Him. Our guardian angel too has the task of interceding on our behalf.

What's important is that we do not want to be distracted, or that we have no intention of being willingly distracted during our time of prayer.

Involuntary distractions which may come about in spite of ourselves, and which we try to reject as soon as we're aware of them, do not lessen the merit or the benefit of prayer. A father or a mother doesn't get annoyed if the baby keeps uttering meaningless noises because it doesn't yet know how to speak.

God knows our weaknesses and is patient, but we have to ask Him: Lord, “grant me the spirit of prayer” (Divine Office, Lauds–Monday of Fourth Week of Lent).

It pleases Our Lord when we resolve to improve our mental prayer each day of our lives—even on those occasions when things require more effort, are difficult, or when we feel arid.

In Point 464 of the Furrow, we’re told, “Prayer is not a question of what you say or feel, but of love. And you love when you try to say something to the Lord, even though you might not actually say anything” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 464).

If this is our approach, then our life will be continually enriched and strengthened.

Every person can only truly know themselves with the light of God.

“All that we can know of ourselves through human means (life experiences, psychology, social sciences) are not to be denigrated…But those things give us a limited and partial knowledge of our being.

“We only have access to our profound identity through the light of God, in the regard that God has on us as the Father in heaven.

“This knowledge has a negative aspect, but it is one that leads to something positive. The negative aspect concerns our sin, our profound misery. We don't recognize it except in the light of God.

“Faced with Him, lies are no longer possible; there's no escaping, no justification, no more masks to cling to. We're obliged to recognize who we are, with our wounds, our weaknesses, our inconsistencies, our egoism, our hardness of heart, our secret complicities with evil.

“Happily, God is tender and merciful, and this light that is shed on us is done so progressively, as we are able to handle it. God only shows us our sin while simultaneously revealing His forgiveness and His mercy. We discover the sadness of our sinful condition, and also our absolute poverty as creatures” (Jacques Philippe, Nine Days to Rediscover the Joy of Prayer).

All this happens in our prayer. “This step toward truth is necessary: there is no healing without knowledge of the sickness. Only the truth makes us free.

“Fortunately, things don’t stop there. They lead on to something still more profound and infinitely beautiful: beyond our sins and our misery, the discovery of our condition as children of God. God loves us just as we are, with an absolutely unconditional love, and it's this love that forms our deepest identity.

“More deep and essential than our human limits and the evil that affects us, there is at our base an intact and pure core, our identity as sons and daughters of God” (Ibid.).

Prayer is a powerful lamp which throws light on our problems, enables us to get to know people better, and thus to help them on their path towards Christ, and to assign the proper place to the matters which preoccupy us.

Our prayer helps God to be the center of our lives. The more He's there, the more we're expecting everything from Him and from Him only, and the more our human relationships will have the chance to be well-adapted and happy.

“Experience shows us that faithfulness to prayer, even if it sometimes goes through difficult periods, moments of dryness, or trying times, progressively leads us to find in God a profound peace, a security, a happiness that makes us free with regard to others and to things” (Ibid.).

Prayer locates the soul in an environment of serenity and of peace, which is then transmitted to others. The joy it produces is a foretaste of the happiness in heaven.

No one on this earth has known how to treat Jesus better than His Mother Mary, who spent long hours looking at Him, speaking with Him, handling Him with simplicity and veneration.

If we turn to Our Mother in heaven, we will learn quite quickly to follow Jesus confidently and to speak with Him very closely.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Olv