It’s Love That Lets Us to Truly Pray

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

DO you have difficulty praying? Try to check if you are in love—that is, in love with God and with everybody else. Without that love, it’s not possible to truly pray. At best, we can give some appearances of prayer, but it would not be a real encounter with God who is ever willing to share what he has with us.

It’s a pity that many of us, including those who are supposed to be our prayer leaders, actually fail to pray even if they go through the different motions of praying. If prayer is just a matter of complying with a certain obligation but done without love, we can only find it boring and meaningless. It would just be a matter of time, before we abandon the practice.

It’s important that we attune ourselves to the dynamic of love initiated by God himself so we would also find ourselves falling in love, the true love that is all at the same time human, natural, spiritual and supernatural. Let’s remember that it is God who loves us first, and we can only learn to love properly if we acknowledge and feel that love God has for us.

For this, we have to make an effort to capture the tremendous love God has for us. Our main problem is that we often ignore that love as we tend to pursue only our own human desires and intentions, guided only by some natural elements that, given our wounded condition, will always bear also the infranatural elements that would be working against us.

To capture that love God has for us, we need not only to exert some effort but also to make a lot of sacrifices, again given the wounded condition of our humanity. That is why, Christ said it very clearly that if we want to follow him as we should, we need to deny ourselves and carry the cross. (cfr. Mt 16,24)

We need to at least make an accounting of how much God loves us before we can learn to love him in return and, thus, make our prayer an occasion to have a truly loving exchange with God.

We have to realize the love behind the fact that God created us to be like him, endowing us among all his creatures with the tremendous gifts of intelligence and will, plus the greatest gift which is his grace.

To top it all, since we cannot avoid messing up these wonderful gifts of God, he offers us his mercy as given to us by Christ, the son of God who became man and offered his life as a ransom for all our sins. If we would just realize how much God loves us, we for sure would also be filled up with love. Love is always repaid with love.

When love inspires our prayer, we would always find the periods of prayer exciting. We would be filled with desires to praise and thank God for the many blessings we have received. We would be willing to imitate the love God has for us as shown to us by Christ who told us to love one another as he himself has loved us. (cfr. Jn 13,34)

We would have many initiatives of how to reach out to the others. We would be willing to bear the burdens of the others. Many virtues develop, like humility, fortitude, temperance, holy purity, etc.

We really have to make sure that our prayer is inspired by love always!

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com