- by Rev. Bob Williams, C.S.B. -

“Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while the judge refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’
And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, God will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
-Luke 18:1-8

Whether we realize it or not, God is at the very heart of existence. It is to God that our inner self, our spiritual self, our mysterious self is drawn, like metal to a magnet, by God alone. That is why prayer is at once natural to human beings and very personal.
God has taken the initiative with us in His divine love, providence and marvellous works on our behalf. Even though all forms of life can react to this divine, creative initiative, only humans can respond to God. When a dog is struck, the dog reacts; when a dog is petted, the dog reacts. Only we, however, have been endowed with the gift of being able to respond. Even though we often react to one another, to what someone says or does to us, we nevertheless have the added gift of being able to channel our reaction through our intellect and free will to effect a conscious and deliberate response. God has given us the ability to reciprocate his love in the same manner as that with which he takes the initiative with us—namely, by the use of understanding and a free choice. Because of this, we have been endowed with the gift of a “response-ability” towards God.
But our response to this call of God to our inner selves is like our response to anything else. It depends on our awareness of the reality of the call. A deeply spiritual person is very conscious of the reality. For those, God’s presence is a reality to which they respond fervently. Those who are not as conscious of the reality of God’s call to their inner selves have little experience of the reality of God’ presence. Their response is weak, or, in some cases completely lacking. In the one case, a person has a deep, trusting relationship with God. In the other, little if anything to do with God.
If prayer is a positive response to the reality of God’s presence in our life, it is easy to see why we can say prayer is our expression of our relationship with God as we live our lives. To put it another way, we can say that prayer is an expression of faith.
Prayer is not a thing to be done, a formula or a mechanical action. It is the expression of a living relationship, a living contact between God and us. The invitation to be at one with God has been constant from the dawn of our salvation history.
Despite the fall of our first parents, God spoke to us through the prophets, asking for a covenant, a pledge of communion. God chose one people to be God’s people and made a particular covenant with them, but they, in turn, were to be the sign and instrument of God’s love and concern for every human being everywhere.
We cannot think of prayer unless we think of covenant or communion with God. Unless prayer expresses an underlying reality of covenant, it is a meaningless formula.
God’s supreme act of communion with the human race, his supreme revelation, his new and everlasting covenant, is Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. As the Word of God, Jesus expresses what the Father is. As the word made flesh, he expresses what we should be, what each one of us should be—or should I say, who each one of us should be?
In our daily lives, therefore, there should be an echo of Jesus’ attitude towards the Father, his attention and responsiveness to the Father, his laying down his life for the Father. All of Salvation history, culminating in Jesus, calls us, commands us, to covenant and to communion with God. For those of us who are aware of the meaning of the presence of God, their entire life is a prayer because we become aware that God is present to us always and everywhere because we live in God’s world. We respond to this presence by the way we live our lives.
Jesus taught us again and again to commune with God. He said that the first word of prayer should be Father. In the last moments of his own life, as the final hours of his life closed in on him, Jesus’ preoccupation was with his Father. The last act of his life was surrender to the Father, the free surrender of love that has completed every detail of the Father’s will.
Jesus gave us his example with regard to prayer, showing us how to pray. He taught us the perfect prayer, the Our Father. Through his prayer Jesus brought out a new dimension in prayer—that our relationship with God is like the relationship of a loving father with his children. God is no longer a remote deity sitting on some distant throne, or a disembodied spirit, judge, or punisher. Jesus has introduced us to a God who is real, who truly cares for his children. This element of the fatherhood-of-God must never be overlooked in our relationship with God in our present day.
He taught us that we should pray always; that it is necessary to ask God to give us his help and favour; that certain dispositions are necessary for effective prayer, the first of which is faith.
Speaking to us through the Gospels, Jesus tells us that many other dispositions are also necessary for prayer. Listed apart from the figurative language of the New Testament, they lose their warmth but not their significance. They are confidence, gratitude, simplicity, acceptance of God’s will, sincerity, forgiveness and reconciliation, generosity, fasting, silence, recollection and desire.
The call to initiate communion with God, and, therefore, to prayer, is based upon the incarnation by which Jesus established a mysterious and wonderful communion with us. He made us his sisters and brothers in flesh—his family in flesh. Then by his death he drew us into his life.
Through his promised Spirit, he constantly opens the way for us to the Father. We are already drawn into his risen life where he sits at the right of the Father, making prayer for us, sending us gifts and the supreme gift of his Spirit. When we are conscious of the God-dimension of our lives, prayer is constant because everything we do is a prayer. We can go about our work, whatever it might be, aware that our lives are God-ordained, and we respond to that awareness by doing our work for God.
As an example, let us consider parents who go to work every day in order to provide for their families. This they can do because they have to, because they are successful, because they want “nice” things, or for a host of other reasons, good, bad, or indifferent. But if they go to work conscious of the God-aspect of life, they go with a different attitude than those who do not go with such an attitude. The work may be the same and the results similar, but some go along unconscious of the divine dimension of life and others go along conscious that God is acting in and through them for the good of others. For those, life is a prayer, for they are responding to the presence of God in their lives. We, too, can respond to God’s presence in our life. We can be pleasant, cheerful, helpful, loyal, or committed because we do what we do in and for God. This is not necessary of course. It just makes whatever we do easier, more pleasant, more personally profitable, and, most important, more human.

***