Personal Prayers

                A good Catholic would definitely say that he starts and ends his day with a prayer. Okay, that’s fine. It is expected of him. Next question: What is the quality of that prayer?

                Many people utter their prayers like a machine doing an automatic, detached task. Prayer, as we are told in our Catechism when we were young, is a conversation with God. When we are conversing with our friends, we are there physically and mentally, ready to hear and give a response if there’s any. It is a two-way process. Our conversation with God is also like that. We don’t treat God as the unresponsive receiver at the end of the line. When we pray, we have to put our entire selves into it, and listen using our hearts. We have to put ourselves before His divine presence. God speaks to us in our prayer, and hearing Him takes a matter of being sincere with our prayer life. Our prayer is our intimate moment with our Father who always wants His children to talk to Him. 

                But many of us would also find ourselves struggling in prayer. There are those who let themselves get easily distracted while praying. There are those who pray because they ‘feel’ like doing so and in the moment that they lack the ‘feeling’, they abandon their prayers. And there are still those who do not know how to pray at all. But God is so good that all these seemingly insincerities, He doesn’t take it against us, for He understands us and all our defects. However, His generosity and compassion is not an excuse for us not to strive to improve our prayer lives. He wants us to persevere in praying. It is in praying that we grow and enrich our understanding of God, and it is also in praying that we show Him that we remember and love him. How many of us would claim that we love our parents but don’t talk to and remember them?

                Although prayer has many forms (the popular ones are those being recited and the liturgical prayers that are in fact encouraged by some priests because they contemplate about the life of Christ), we should not forget to allot time for personal prayers - the kind of prayers where we talk about just anything about Him and about ourselves: joys, sorrows, successes and failures, noble ambitions, daily worries, weaknesses, thanksgiving and petitions, etc.

                A priest friend of mine advised that when I do these personal prayers, I should use a book and a notebook. The book (it could be the Bible or any reviewed Christian book for spiritual reading) serves as the jumping board for my conversation with God and the notebook is where I jot down the wisdom and the answers that come up in the middle of my prayer. The notebook is also where I place the points that I would like to bring up to my prayer. This whole thing might sound complicated but it indeed helps. It makes me monitor my resolutions and review my past insights. The idea is our prayer should become something of a concrete and productive relationship with God. I know people who use the same ‘technique’, and they seem happy about it.  

                Although we have our own ways of praying, it is important that we put value on the quality of our prayer. It may not be as intense as what more pious people do, but at least we commit a regular time for prayer every day, despite the emotional dryness and the lack of feeling for it. It is our will to be with God that matters. But most important is that we know how to pray! 

                “You say you don’t know how to pray? Put yourself in the presence of God, and once you have said, ‘Lord, I don’t know how to pray!’ rest assured that you have begun to do so.” (The Way, # 90)