Turn everything into prayer

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

THAT’S the challenge we have to learn to tackle. That’s because prayer is the ideal condition we can have in this life. It establishes and keeps our proper relation with God. It makes us discern God’s abiding interventions in our life, prompting us on how we have to think, speak, do, react and behave in any situation we can find ourselves in. Let’s remember that God speaks to us in all the situations, conditions and circumstances of our life.

Prayer gives us the proper attitude toward God and others and everything else in our life. It enables to love properly and to develop the virtues that we all need to grow toward the perfection of our humanity.

Prayer is our basic correspondence to God’s continuing work of creation and redemption in us. We need it much more than we need air or food. Thus, we need to do our part in learning it and in doing it all our life.

In other words, with prayer we do our part in building up in ourselves the image of God who is fully revealed, given and shared with us in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Christ is the pattern of our humanity and the redeemer of our damaged humanity. We are supposed to be “alter Christus,” another Christ.

It’s important that our prayer is considered as necessary and indispensable as breathing. This is how to make prayer very personal and abiding. Short of that, it’s very understandable to deem prayer as a useless burden.

With prayer, we can get to be receptive to God’s will and ways. We become familiar with his words and his teachings that are a sure guide in our life. With it, we are not simply living our life on our own. We are living it with God, which is how our life should be, since we are his creatures, and creatures made in his image and likeness, meant to enter and take part in the very life of God himself.

With prayer, we get to share in a most intimate way what God has—his wisdom, his power, his goodness, mercy and compassion, his knowledge of things, etc. And especially when the sting of our weakness and the strong temptations come, prayer is what enables us to deal with them properly.

We actually never run out of material for prayer. And the very feeling of boredom and helplessness, for example, is a very fertile ground for prayer to grow. If we would react to this predicament with humility, that’s when we can easily become intimate and sincere with God, and prayer can spontaneously start.

Actually, with just a little effort, we can already pray. For sure, we will always have some plans and intentions that we can pray for. They can be something personal, or related to the family, our work, our relations with others.

To be sure, prayer can lend itself to different forms and ways. There’s the vocal prayer, the liturgical prayer, the meditative and contemplative prayer. But even in the midst of our hectic temporal affairs, we can still manage to pray as we ought if we only know how to do everything with God and for God, if not with actual intention, then at least with virtual intention.

We should just learn to develop the discipline of praying. We should train ourselves in this indispensable duty of ours.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com