“How to Pray?”
Prayer explores the problems and blocks we experience as we seek to trust God’s love and respond to it. It works with our unhealed wounds, our abused ability to trust, the infected anger that is not yet able to cleanse, the fatigue and draining we experience as we try to give and to love, and that strange feeling of God’s absence that sometimes overcomes us. It explores our fears, to rebuild our trust, to renew strength, to affirm our borders, to share more deeply God’s pain and God’s joy.
The awareness of God’s presence and guidance comes to us in many different ways: sometimes through inner picturing, sometimes through a word or phrase that rises spontaneously, sometimes through an emotional feeling, sometimes through an intuitive sensing, sometimes through a message from your body. If nothing special rises during prayer, it is enough just to claim God’s presence (even if you cannot feel it), to rest, and to breath gently, letting each breath remind you of God’s breath of life breath into you. Observe your bodily feelings at such times. Bodily awareness is just as powerful as is inner envisioning, since our bodies are given to us as our spiritual companions. Not everyone is able to respond to guided meditations with inner pictures, and we should release ourselves and others to alternative ways of deep prayer.
“there is no place or time we cannot pray.”
-Our Daily Bread (nabasa ko lang.)
As you pray, sit or lie down in whatever position is most relaxed and comfortable. Or, walk around if that feels more natural. Listen to music, light a candle if you need a focusing centre, or hold some picture or object in your hand that draws your attention to God. Feel free to use your five senses: touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell. Our senses are given to us as spiritual companions to help us become more aware of God.
If any of these suggested meditations do not feel right for you, claim your freedom to withdraw from the meditation. Change any of the metaphors or symbols. Or, move into some other form of prayer which is right for you at this time. Each relationship with God is unique. Each way of growing and opening is somewhat different from every other way. All we can do for one another is to share our own experience with God, suggest aids and alternatives, but never to push or manipulate, or to compel imitation.
“Teach me to pray, this is my heart-cry day unto day, I long to know your will and your way..”
If God has all power and all knowledge, surely prayer has no difficulties, though occasionally there may be perplexities. We cannot discover God’s method, but we know something of His manner of answering prayer.
“How God answers Prayer?”
He reveals His mind to those who pray. His Holy Spirit puts fresh ideas into the minds of praying people. God has many things to say to us. He has many thoughts to put into our minds. Prayer gives God opportunity of speaking to us and revealing His will to us. God answers others prayer by putting new thoughts into the minds of those we pray for. But we should never think it reasonable that God should make some things dependent upon our prayers. Some people say that if God is really loves us He would give us what is best for us whether we ask Him or not. God cannot do some things unless we work. He stores the hills with marble, but He has never built a cathedral. He fills the mountains with iron ore, but He never makes a needle or a locomotive. He leaves that to us. We must work.
“In my life, His will be done..”
