👉In the "New Covenant" made by our Creator God with humanity (Jeremiah 31:31-34) every person can know God from within - because the Holy Spirit is revealing our Creator to all who are willing to know the Lord and trust in Him. We can still help each other along the way; so may you be pleased to find here a variety of helps to the life of faith in God through Jesus Christ. G.S.
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Praying – What is that?
For someone who has never really prayed before – a simple approach to prayer
Prayer is simply visiting with God – the Creator of the Universe – who is always present. Christians believe that Jesus revealed God to be a Trinity, a Community of Divine Persons: the Father, the Son – who is also the human known as Jesus – and the Holy Spirit. Here are some simple helps for visiting with God in prayer.
Okay, fine, but what the heck is prayer anyway?
Taking our cue from the Star Trek universe…
Do you feel or think prayer is something saints and mystics do but we ordinary mortals could never hope to do or experience? For people like us, isn’t prayer just turning to God in our times of need? Asking for what we or our loved ones need has always been a normal function of praying, but there is more to it than that. In the fictional Star Trek universe, the first goal of exploring space is to discover new life forms and make first contact with them in the hope of establishing ongoing relations between them and the people of Earth and the members of the United Federation of Planets. So how do they make such contact? The Starship Captain’s usual command generally goes like this: “Open all hailing frequencies.” After this the first message basically introduces them, declares peaceful intentions, and asks for a response. Prayer really is as simple as that, at least to begin with.
“Open all hailing frequencies.”
How do we “open all hailing frequencies” to God? We’re not using sophisticated tech and equipment in the exercise of prayer, but we are making us of all our human faculties: physical senses, our intellectual and psychological faculties, the faculties of our heart, and of our spirit or soul. God connects with us on the inside.
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Praying is Simply visiting with God
Every living, breathing human being has expectations, and these expectations change with incidents we experience in time. What do we expect of life, of others, of ourselves, and of God? What are God’s expectations of us? What kind of blessing do you as a married couple expect from God in your marriage? There is no escape from human suffering and death, but you might expect God to minimize your pain and delay your death to an advanced age. You may be afraid of marital difficulties and expect God to save you from friction and marriage failure. You may fear giving birth to less than perfect children and expect God to prevent deformities and other tragedies from happening. The expectations you might have of God could be as extensive as your fears about life. It is quite human to have fears, but a life primarily driven by fears would be a wretched existence. Love is a much more reliable engine for our lives, health, marriage, family, career, friendships, projects, and leisure.
Most would expect engaged and married couples to have within them deep desires that are real – for all that is true, right, good, loving, and beautiful. Taken together, these desires look like the desire for happiness, and constitute a great motor driving our decisions and choices. It is considered wise – the Bible often speaks of this – to seek the counsel and experience of our elders. Yet, we who are alive at present and belong to the 21st century culture are so wary of being told how to live our lives, that we are loath to seek advice. We value our own competence and independence, which can hinder us from being really open to benefit from the experience of others in order to make better decisions; so bent are we on making those decisions by ourselves, alone.
As we attach ourselves to our own motives at this level; we see that God has expectations of engaged and married couples, and of families, as of all his children. The first human beings knew what God expected of them, and they were happy to carry it out. Then they were tempted to doubt the generosity of God’s motives in the few restrictions He had put on their choices. They decided to be free from God’s expectations, and ventured into behavior they had been warned to avoid. Since they had taken back the trust they had until then put in God, the result was the loss of the harmony and peace they had enjoyed with God, with each other, and with all other creatures. To this day we are no longer in harmony with God, with each other, or with Creation. We rely far too much on our own opinions and preferences, going so far as to avoid following or even asking for advice; even when this results in pain, suffering, and death. This is why humanity and the natural environment are in trouble.
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Where Paleontology, Archaeology, Anthropology, & the Sacred Scriptures Meet
We don’t know when the first generations of human beings lived, symbolized as they are in Adam and Eve of Genesis in the Bible. Were they at the beginning of the genus “Homo” in Africa 2.5 million years ago, or 500,000 years ago when Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East evolved bigger brains than ours today, or when the first homo sapiens developed bigger brains 300,000 years ago with the daily use of fire, or with the evolution of “Homo sapiens sapiens” 200,000 years ago in East Africa, or with the “Cognitive Revolution” 70,000 years ago and the emergence of fictive language, the ability to conceive and express abstract realities, or most recently with the agricultural revolution 14,000 years ago? We don’t know. What God reveals in Genesis, in the beginning, whenever that was, is that man left God to prefer our current state of rebellion and ignorance.
In time, God chose a people for himself, with a merciful plan to restore them to harmony by giving them what the first human beings had as a natural conscience before they turned away from trust in their Creator God. With Moses God gave 10 commandments and said: “Choose life or death: keep the Lord’s commandments and you shall live; break these commandments, and you shall surely die. Consider well, and choose between life and death.” It was a struggle for people to observe the Law and all that God expected of them. They felt faith in God was a burden and didn’t always feel close to God. Then, “God so loved the world that He sent his only Son.”
Jesus came to restore us to harmony with God his Father, with each other, and with all other creatures. He did not come only for the people alive on Earth when He came as man, because He continues to come to each person in every generation until the end of the world. Jesus uses various means to get our attention and then offers us life; that we might be able to live a life like his own. As we respond to Jesus and open ourselves with trust to Him, He lets us know what God expects of us, and we allow Him to have influence in our lives.
According to John 17:3, Jesus said that eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. Jesus lived the most human life ever lived, in perfect harmony in himself, with other people, and all creatures. He lived in a way that was in divine communion with his heavenly Father. He clearly intends for us and all his disciples to learn from Him. Jesus continues to send his Holy Spirit in us to guide us into living our life as He lived his. Jesus went to Synagogue every Friday and every Saturday rested with his family before God, to study the Scriptures and discuss life. He prayed 7 times a day: on waking, before every meal, at the beginning and end of his work, and before going to bed. He lived in the peace, trust, and joy that come from knowing his Father’s love. He worked, made his contribution to society, and earned food for the family. He faced the world with courage, resisting its efforts to pull Him away from doing the Father’s will. He lived on good terms with all, was kind to the poor and suffering, and forgave all who offended Him; even with love and mercy to enemies.
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Jesus gives us
the Holy Spirit to help us pray and live as He did. We turn to God in
prayer as we get ready for sleep and upon waking in the morning. We go to
Sunday Mass and worship the Lord, resting all day with our family and friends, spending
time with our spouse and playing with our children, reading, discussing, and
learning more about God, and enjoying the Lord’s Day. Like Jesus we pray often
during the day – bringing God into the different experiences and concerns of
our day – praying alone, as a couple, and also as a family.
We live in the peace, trust, and joy that flow from our Father’s love. We work all week to make our contribution to society and support our family, face the world with courage, resist its efforts to pull us away from our family or from doing the Father’s will. We live on good terms with all, show kindness to the poor and suffering, forgive all who offend us, and give love and mercy even to those who make themselves our enemies.
Jesus did not take his standards for living from the world, but from his Father’s will, which He knew from Scripture, the Synagogue, the teaching of his parents and rabbis, and from personal prayer and converse with his Father. As his disciples, we cannot afford to take our standards for the conduct of our lives from the world, but from Jesus. Jesus sets our standards – as the Person against whom we do well to measure ourselves – for one day we will want to be able to show the Father all the fruit we have generated from all his gifts to us.
Jesus lived his life as a vibrant, intimate, constant relationship with his Father in heaven, and He calls us to do the same. Jesus’ faith, hope, and love of his Father were out in the light of day for all to see, though He kept much of it concealed in his heart. Still, his faith in God was not occult but public. Our faith in God must likewise be open and public – not occult or hidden. When a person considers himself a Christian, yet does not participate in Sunday worship every week, does not pray alone every day, does not pray openly – at home and in public places like work, church, and society – then that person’s faith is occult or hidden and rather sterile; that limits what God can give and do for them. They push God into the shadows, the corners of their lives.
That leaves the wide-open spaces of their home and lives empty, attracting all kinds of other influences to come and set up shop. They are more easily manipulated and controlled by other people whose motives and intentions can be quite dark. This in turn can open them up to harassment by dark powers and the influence of demons – all the manifestations of evil that we associate with the “occult”. God abides by the laws He has put in place to govern our lives, including the law of freedom. This means that if we want God to actually be God in our lives; it is up to us to take Him seriously, to put our trust in Him, surrender our lives and homes to Him, pray, and openly practice our faith. These attitudes bear fruit every day as we deliberately practice them.
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Living as a Christian, as a disciple of Jesus, includes praying individually and even openly with others. To get over the initial embarrassment and hesitations that can keep you from even trying to pray by yourself or with others, just ask God to help you and start; just do it. Keep in mind that God is alive and was the first One ever to love you. The Father loved you even before you were conceived, when you were only one possibility out of hundreds of thousands in your mother’s ovaries and your father’s testes. He picked you because He wanted you to have life and come into the world; so you might know Him and his never-ending love for you. As you begin to pray, and return to prayer each day – alone and with others – remember that you are responding to God’s invitation. He is always there first, waiting for us to reveal a little more of Himself and his love for us.
A brief reflection on God and the Holy Trinity
Our Christian faith informs and confirms our own human experience that there is only one true God. At all times as we turn to God and pray to Him we deepen this experience of the oneness and uniqueness of God. In addition, what Jesus revealed about God also progressively enters into our own personal experience. While God is a single divine being, there is so much life in God that there are actually three divine Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Even more mysteriously, the second Person, the Son, took to Himself a human life conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary at the very moment she gave her consent to the will of God as expressed to her by the Archangel Gabriel. “Let it be done to me… as you say.”
In his humanity, Jesus of Nazareth revealed to humanity for all time through his Jewish contemporaries that this one true God is composed of three divine Persons, and that He is Himself the Son of the Father, and that He alone knows the Father and makes Him known to all who come to Him and believe in Him. Towards the end of his earthly life and ministry, Jesus told his Apostles of another, the Advocate, the Consoler, the Holy Spirit, who would continue to teach them after his departure, reminding them of all that He had taught them.
In the "New Covenant" made by our Creator God with humanity (Jeremiah 31:31-34) every person can know God from within - because the Holy Spirit is revealing our Creator to all who are willing to know the Lord and trust in Him. We can still help each other along the way; so may you be pleased to find here a variety of helps to the life of faith in God through Jesus Christ. G.S.
© 2006-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal QC
© 2006-2021 Tous droits rĂ©servĂ©s AbbĂ© Gilles Surprenant, PrĂŞtre AssociĂ© de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, MontrĂ©al QC
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