| LISTENING TO GOD IN PRAYER The habit of daily mental prayer. By Fr. Julio Peņacoba INTRODUCTION The theme of my prayer is the theme of my life. That is the way I speak to God. As I consider my situation, there comes to mind a specific and firm resolution to change, to improve, to be more docile to the love of God. Our Mother, you brought to earth Jesus, who reveals the love of our Father God. Help us to recognize him in the midst of the cares of each day. Stir up our mind and will so that we may listen to the voice of God, to the calls of grace (Blessed Josemaria Escriva; Christ is Passing By, n.174) ------------------- This booklet is all about learning how to listen to God in prayer. When two persons meet and communicate, they both speak and listen to each other. Likewise, prayer is supposed to be a two-way communication with God where we speak and listen to God. It is easy to speak to God in prayer but not everybody is familiar with how to listen to Him. And yet, coming to think of it, listening to God is more important than speaking to Him. There is plenty of material about prayer. Much of it --beginning with the fourth section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church-- is very good and deep. I still decided to offer this booklet as a help to get people started with the habit of daily mental prayer or meditation. It has a practical approach. I simply attempted to put into writing the experience of countless ordinary people who have learned to do mental prayer guided by the secular spirituality of Blessed Josemaria Escriva. The good news is that it works. There are literally hundreds of thousands of ordinary and busy people who practice daily mental prayer as a dialogue with God. They spend daily some time (somewhere between 15 minutes to one hour) talking and listening to God about their daily concerns (theirs and God's). During that time, they get things from God that influence the way they live, work and relate with others. Who could be interested in this booklet? I will answer while explaining something about levels of faith and prayer. Indifferent level. There are people who do not relate with God and seldom feel the need to pray. They live as if God does not exist; they organize their lives without counting much on God or his ways. There are plenty of them in Europe and in the U.S. but not so many in the Philippines. This booklet is not for them. Basic faith level. Other people have more faith; they know that there is an almighty and loving God and they pray to Him. These people spontaneously turn to God in prayer: they present to Him their needs and desires in petition prayer; they give thanks to God and praise Him for the good things in their lives; they even ask pardon from God when they feel guilty. But many of those people seldom listen to God: their prayer life seems to be one- way only; they seldom practice reflective and listening prayer, the one we call here mental prayer or meditation. This booklet is for them: it is meant to be an introduction to the habit of daily mental prayer. Loving faith level. There are people who communicate with God in a loving way. They go to God not only to speak to Him about their needs but also to listen to God about his needs. They want to help God; they want to know God's will and to commit themselves to carry it out. Those people might not need this booklet but they may find it useful to understand better the kind of prayer they have been practicing. To visualize these distinctions of levels of faith and prayer we can use the following table: LEVEL OF FAITH PRAYER TYPE FREQUENCY Indifferent No way Very seldom Basic Faith One-waymostly petitions andvocal prayers As need arises Loving Faith Two-waySpeaking, listening andResponding Daily TWO IMPORTANT CLARIFICATIONS Prayer is a mystery. It happens because the mysterious initiative of God who loves us and wants to actualize his covenant --already established for ever in Christ-- with each of us. Whatever initiative, activity and progress in prayer happens because of the loving action of the Holy Spirit. On our part, we just receive the grace of faith to recognize his goodness and love for us; once filled with this awareness, we --prompted again by the Holy Spirit-- might respond lovingly in different degrees and ways. The implication of all this mysteric nature of prayer is that it can never be achieved by our own initiative, efforts, methods or techniques. Why then writing about practical suggestions and methods in prayer as I have attempted to do in this booklet? The answer is that, in the assumption that prayer does happen in grace, we can learn something from the prayer experience of people. And so the clarification needed at the beginning of this booklet is --do not expect too much from this material; rather expect everything from God. The all basic thing in prayer is not a method but a humble heart that makes room for the gift of God we call prayer. The second important clarification is about LISTENING in prayer. If the whole experience of prayer is a mystery, much so is it the aspect of prayer we call "listening". This is a common warning from the saints: we cannot be absolutely certain that something we "hear", "see" or "get" in prayer it is God's word. The listening always happens through our human nature --our mind, our thinking, our conscience, our emotions and feelings. But our nature is a fallen and limited one, subject to the influence of our own desires and even the bad spirit or devil. That is why saints --like St. Ignatius of Loyola and many others-- have warned us of the need of discernment and spiritual direction to, so to speak, double check what we "see" in prayer. Particularly, when it comes to faith and morals, we can be sure of having "listened" wrongly whenever we "hear" in prayer something that contradicts the official teaching of the Church as presented in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church and other documents. Given the practical and simple approach of this booklet, there is no room to discuss properly the need to form our conscience. I would refer any reader to the section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on conscience (nn.1776-1802). Much less can I present the basic guidelines of discernment among options all valid within faith and morals. I would refer to specialized books on the subject or more simply to consult an appropriate person. In any case, I strongly recommend --along with the whole tradition in the Church-- to practice regular confession in a manner that our conscience can be formed properly while being helped in discerning whatever happens in our experience of prayer. Manila, 14 February 1999 |