Growing in Prayer

Are we entirely happy with the way we are growing spiritually? If we are not, we are in good company, right in the same league with Augustine himself, who tells us:

Never stop questioning yourself. Let your present state always leave you dissatisfied, if you want to become what you are not yet. For whenever you grow satisfied with yourself, you stop making progress (sermon 169, 18).

...Augustine also tells us that we cannot really know another person unless we are willing to receive him into our midst and strive towards real friendship with him (De Div. Quaestionibus 83). In the same way we cannot expect to really know Jesus unless we are willing to know him personally, as a friend, and not just as the object of a good book or as the ideal of the saints. Too many people -even priests and religious- can talk about God as an object of speculation, of intellectual curiosity, but they will never really know him unless they search for him and his will, as one person relates with another.

...We always find time for the things we consider important in life, even for the trivial: the daily newspaper, our favorite TV show, a sports event, a meeting, etc. If God is important to us -and how can he not be? - we will find time, we will make time for him also. Prayer -interior, contemplative, silent prayer - will not be something we "squeeze in" at the last moment, or to which we give the minimum time required, or from which we excuse ourselves for almost any reason at all... Prayer will be a real treasure for us when we succeed in making it less complicated, less routine, and look upon it as it really is: a personal encounter with Jesus, with a friend, with the one who loves us and gives us life, and is anxious to have us draw closer to him. When that happens, then we will have begun to burst those bonds, those marble blocks, that restrain us and have perhaps tied us down for too long, so that we can be truly free to grow and become what we are not yet.

By Fr. Theodore V. Tack, OSA from "Growing in Prayer."

Posted by Carlos J. Medina