Prayer is Basic in Our Life of Piety

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

IT’S, of course, a given. Prayer is basic in our life of piety because that is our personal effort to get in touch with God. All other acts of piety would be of no value if they are not done as prayer or, at least, accompanied by prayer.

We need to learn how to really pray. It should not just be some exercise done out of compliance of a certain expectation. It should truly be a personal encounter with God who, in the first place, is always with us, ever solicitous of our needs and conditions, and eager to lead us along the right path toward our eternal destination.

With faith, hope and charity which, in the first place, God gives us, we can discern God’s presence in our mind and heart, and start to hear his voice that would surely tell us what to think, say and do. Let’s remember that, more than us, it’s God who is actually directing our life here on earth. What a pity it would be if we would just rely on our own estimation of things to guide us in our earthly sojourn!

For this, we need to learn how to be recollected all the time even while we immerse ourselves in our earthly and temporal affairs. This spirit of recollection would not in any way undermine our human activities, as many people somehow think. On the contrary, it purifies our human ways of doing things, and puts them on the right track.

This spirit of recollection may control our tendency to be simply spontaneous in our actuations, a tendency that is spurred and guided by our animal instincts and our temporal rationality that is not proper to our real human and Christian identity and dignity. But this spirit of recollection is what would truly help us in our activities.

This, of course, would require some effort on our part. We should just develop the discipline of spending time familiarizing ourselves with this truth of our faith, getting to know God more and more by meditating on his word that is available in many sources. And from there, let’s start to savor the words and deeds of Christ which show his great and infinite love for us, and develop an intimate relationship with him.

Let’s hope that out of our prayer, our direct encounter with God, we get filled with holy desires to do a lot of good, unafraid of whatever sacrifices may be involved. We should be men of desires to see God.

St. Augustine said that since we don’t see God now and yet we long for it, we need to keep on desiring it to prepare ourselves for it.  That desire not only has to be maintained. It also has to increase as time passes. The time of our life, the time of waiting to see our ultimate end, God, is a time to cultivate our holy desire to the max.

His argument for this is beautiful. “Suppose you are going to fill some container and you know you will be given a large amount. Then you set about stretching your container.” It is to make room for the tremendous amount we will receive—God himself.

The idea of stretching or enlarging the container to receive a tremendous amount that we expect can be translated into not only keeping but also increasing our desire of God whom we expect to come to us in overwhelming abundance. In short, we have to make that desire fervent! We need to constantly feed it to keep it burning.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com