The Year of Prayer: An invitation to communion with the divine
Prayer is definitely going to be a hot topic in the Church, now that Pope Francis has just inaugurated a Year of Prayer ahead of the 2025 Jubilee, calling on the faithful “to pray more fervently to prepare ourselves to live properly this grace-filled event and to experience the power of hope in God.
Feb 02, 2024
As I was contemplating - Fr Gerard Theraviam
Prayer is definitely going to be a hot topic in the Church, now that Pope Francis has just inaugurated a Year of Prayer ahead of the 2025 Jubilee, calling on the faithful “to pray more fervently to prepare ourselves to live properly this grace-filled event and to experience the power of hope in God.” The Year of Prayer is dedicated “to rediscovering the great value and absolute need for prayer, prayer in personal life, in the life of the Church, prayer in the world.”
Of course, prayer should obviously be a part of our daily lives but often, people struggle with it. Some may find it dry and others may wonder why bother at all when God doesn’t seem to answer their prayers. But surely this kind of thinking seems to look at prayer in utilitarian terms – in terms of what I can get out of God? Often, our prayer consists of setting our ‘shopping lists’ before God and hoping that they are answered according to our will and desires. Surely, prayer is much more than that! Prayer is about our communication and relationship with a loving God who wants to embrace His daughters and sons. It is about laying our lives before God, knowing that God provides for all our needs. Prayer involves an orientation of our entire being toward God.
A helpful acronym is ACTS, which is adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (or petition). Interestingly, supplication comes last of all. Yet for many, that seems to be the main reason to pray – and often when all is well, our need to go to God in prayer seems diminished and we can easily set aside our prayer time for other pursuits. Prayer will not make life easier, but certainly we will cope better as we come to realise we are not alone in our journey- God accompanies us. Indeed, God draws us closer into His embrace.
The Year of Prayer will likely allow us to examine our motivations as well as to, perhaps, learn new ways of praying. Certainly, we need to move away from merely ‘saying prayers’ towards actual prayer, involving not just our minds and lips but also our hearts and our whole beings. Some of us might discover that prayer methods which have served us well in the past no longer have the same appeal. Perhaps our lives and personalities have changed with time. From my own personal experience, Charismatic praise and worship with exuberant singing and clapping have made way for quieter, contemplative prayer. That might be due to age or even movements in my spiritual life. What had earlier brought a sense of warmth and goodness now leave me cold. It forced me to consider my motivations. In prayer, had I been looking for the consolations of God, rather than the God of Consolations?
“Pray as you can, not as you can’t.” These wise and comforting words are credited to Abbot John Chapman (1865 – 1993), an English Benedictine monk, abbot, and scholar. Many people wrote to him for advice in the area of prayer, including laypeople, monks, nuns, and priests. They worried that their tried and trusted ways of prayer were no longer ‘working’, in that they no longer felt the consolations or positive feelings that accompanied prayer. Their prayer now had become dry and unfulfilling. They seemed to be encountering what spiritual authors call the ‘dark night’. The good abbot invited them to follow the promptings of the Spirit and allow God to lead them to new contemplative ways of praying, perhaps also with guidance from a spiritual guide/director. Their old ways of prayer had involved much effort on their part but now they were invited to adopt a more passive form of spirituality, allowing God to do it all, while we wait and wonder, rather than to determine our own path. Obviously, this also involves listening to God. Contemplative prayer is “one long act of love, not of my love to God, but of His love to me.”
May this Year of Prayer also help us to be more disciplined in the area of prayer. It is not enough to merely wish to improve our prayer lives. We need to take concrete steps to move along to the Spirit’s promptings. Discipline must be employed if we truly want to make a change. Let us not also be anxious about dryness in prayer. It is in dryness that our faith is tested and strengthened. St Mother Teresa of Kolkata said that “it is more important to be faithful than successful.”
Underlying all this is the fact that we are all unique individuals who cannot be pigeon-holed and dealt with in the same way. Each of us has a different journey of prayer to make and it is futile to compare ourselves with others. Ultimately, we all hope to be in greater union with God, just as God also desires this greater union. As we are led by the Spirit this year towards new forms of prayer, may we allow them to help us be in closer communion with God and all creation.
(Fr Gerard Theraviam is the Parish Priest of the Cathedral of St John the Evangelist in Kuala Lumpur, as well as the Spiritual Director to the World Community for Christian Meditation, Malaysia.)
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