Are we truly prayerful persons?

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

“Jesus went up to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God.” (Lk 6,12)

What a tremendous fact in the life of Christ for us to consider! We should be edified by that example. Christ is God and therefore has no need to pray. Yet he is also man and as such is in need of prayer as a way to be always in touch with God, as any man should be.

What we can adduce from this fact is that, like Christ who is the pattern of our humanity, we are supposed to be men and women of prayer. We need to do everything for us to make this ideal a reality in our lives.

We have to realize that prayer should always have priority over all other activities we have during the day. Better said, we have to learn how to convert everything into prayer so that we can say that our whole life is a prayer itself, as it should be.

And that is always possible because all we have to do is to fulfil our duties and responsibilities out of love for God and neighbor, doing them in the best way we can, for such is the way of love. And the duties and responsibilities we have are the usual tasks we do everyday.

It’s when we pray that we manage to relate who we are, what we have, what we do, etc. to our ultimate end which, to be sure, is not something only natural but is also supernatural. Nothing therefore can rival the importance of prayer. In other words, prayer is irreplaceable, unsubstitutable, indispensable. It’s never optional, though it has to be done freely if we want our prayer to be real prayer.

Of course, we also have to understand that prayer can lend itself to many different ways. There’s vocal prayer, mental prayer, contemplative prayer, liturgical prayer, ejaculatory prayer, etc. It can adapt itself to different situations and conditions.

The absolutely important thing that makes prayer real prayer is when we manage to give all our mind and heart to God in whatever thing we do or in whatever situation we may find ourselves in.

We have to be reminded that the quality of our prayer determines in the end the quality of our life. How our prayer is will somehow shape how our life will be. And that’s simply because our prayer is the basic way of connecting with God who is the source and keeper of our life, and in fact, in whose image and likeness we have been created, and whose life we are supposed to participate.

In other words, the ideal life we ought to have is when our life enters into the very life of God. And that ideal is basically pursued in our earthly sojourn through our prayer which is how we first and last relate ourselves with God.

If we do not have a life of prayer, the best thing that can happen to us is to simply lead an animal life. It might be a rational life too, but it would only be up to there at its best state, which is not yet what is ideal for us. And certainly, that rationality would be erratic.

We should do everything to cultivate a life, if not, a culture of prayer. Let’s take the challenge. We should not just acknowledge this need. We have to attend to it with an appropriate action plan.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com