In classical spirituality, prayer is defined as “speaking to God”, the raising of the soul to God,” or the lifting up of mind and heart to God.” these ideas run along parallel lines but they have something in common. They emphasize the vertical dimension of prayer. The upward movement of our prayer has a long history that dates back to the time of the Chosen People of God. Israel’s religiosity is built on the foundation of divine transcendence. Yahweh is high up there. There is a sense of confidence in God’s goodness and a sense of awe before the divine majesty. Prayer becomes like fragrant incense rising up to heaven. However, there is a shadow side to this upward movement. It gives us the impression that we have to exert our own effort in approaching God. Prayer looks like a pre-arranged “audience with God,” wherein we can pour out all our unarticulated sentiments. The German theologian Karl Rahner says that overemphasis on “speaking to God” seems to profane the divine mystery or reduce the divine person to the level of other beings.

Given our activity-minded culture, “speaking to God” now becomes the most convenient form of prayer. After saying our prayers, all we have to do is leave the church or chapel and forget about the content of our prayers, “the ball is now in God’s hands,” so to speak. We even rush our prayers because we have little more time left. Moreover, there are those of us who think the more prayers they say, the holier they become. Thus, they spend long hours in prayer in the belief they become holier afterward. We just hope the Spirit will give them consolations just the same, at least, in fairness to the time they spend in saying their prayers.

This may be the strongest reason why we do not grow spiritually as a people. We do not allow ourselves to get into the process of deepening our relationship with God. In Christian prayer, mouthing words is not enough. In the end, we can say a lot of prayers without becoming prayerful. This is the attitude that Jesus is warning us today in our gospel. Jesus does not want us to imitate what the Pharisees and the Scribes usually do during his time.

More than saying prayers or doing prayer activities, what is important is that we need to cultivate the attitude of prayerfulness. Prayerfulness is an attitude of the heart. It flows from our inmost being. It is the disposition to be always open to the movement of the Spirit in our lives. Walter Kasper reminds us that faith is not about seeing a different world, but about seeing the same world from a different perspective. We do not yearn for a pie in the sky or for an automatic solution to our problem. We simply relate human events to God’s loving design. In spirituality, what makes a difference is not the number of prayer activities that we do, but the depth of our relationship with God. The quality of that relationship reflects the intensity of our faith.

Jesus taught us how to pray. He introduced to us the prayer that He himself prayed to His Father, “The Lord’s Prayer”. By using this prayer, we ourselves also enter into the Spirit and mind of Jesus Christ. We also become adopted sons and daughters of God by calling God as our Father. For me, it is a very great privilege for all of us to be called such. God gave us through the person of Jesus Christ the dignity of being the children of God, which we are not worthy of because of our sins. However, because of God’s great love for us, he made it so. God’s love is indeed, far greater than our sins.

Speaking to God is meaningful only insofar as it is grounded in a dialogue of faith. We just do not deliver our “speech” to God in an endless monologue. Dialogue of faith happens when we get to kneel down or sit back and listen to the inspirations of the Spirit. Back in our catechism days we were told that “God is greater than human beings.” That teaching sounds very elementary, indeed. But there is a whole new world of wisdom that we can draw from it. For instance, we can establish that if God is greater than humanity, then God’s Word is greater than human word. Then we who find “speaking to God” so important to the nature of prayer will now have to loosen our convictions a bit, and begin to embrace the fact that the greater Word of God is worth listening to after all. Our human speech is nothing compared to God’s Word. The reason we find it very difficult to listen to God’s Word is that we are too full of our own human words, as if these were the only things that matter most to us when we pray. We have gone out from the prayer of the young Samuel, “speak Lord, your servant is listening” (1 Samuel 3:10). Oftentimes, we reverse the whole situation and we pray, “listen Lord, your servant is speaking.”

The fundamental attitude of a Christian at prayer is that of “listening”. Only when we have listened to God can we have the right to speak to Him. We have to learn something from our liturgical practice, the Liturgy of the Word comes first. We listen to the readings. We listen to the priest’s homily. Only after having listened to the Word of God do we make our intercessory prayers. And there a dialogue of faith unfolds before the entire community.

We do not take issue with the concept of raising our heart and mind to God. Even today we still talk of the vertical dimension of prayer, that is to say, the human attempt to open oneself to the Divine Mystery. We have no problem with that at all. The problem, however, lies in the content of our prayer. We do not lift up an empty heart or mind, do we? The thing is, what is inside that heart? What is inside that mind? If it is primarily about the self, then we have been raising our self-centered heart and mind to God all along. And we do not grow in the Spirit that way.

If God is the primary focus of our prayer, then the deeper motivation for prayer should really be our love for God. Thomas Aquinas defines God’s friendship with humanity as charity. God was the one who took the initiative to enter into friendship with us and gave us the gift of the Spirit as our common ground with the Divine. Aquinas built this idea on Aristotle’s concept of friendship, one that is based on some common ground, whether citizenship, family, or interest. The Father loves us with the same love with which He loves the Son. That is the greatest contribution of Thomas to the theology of charity and prayer. For which reason, he says that prayer is the first gift of charity.

Should we still insist on starting our prayer with our own human needs? It surely casts doubt on our motives if we keep on asking favors from a friend. We do not nourish our friendship that way. We come to visit our friends because we treasure their presence more than how they can be of help to us. We celebrate together in thanking God for the gift of each other’s personhood. For sure, friends can and do help us. But the favors are merely the consequences of a shared relationship and not the main reason for friendship.

If we take our cue from the “always greater” dimension of God, then we know that God’s listening capacity is also greater than ours. Then, too, our “speaking to God” will now be seen as the human response to the One who first calls us to enter into a dialogue of faith.

We are never prohibited from asking God God’s blessings. After all, Jesus said to his disciples “ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you.” (Mt. 7:7) What we have to bear in mind is that Jesus wants us to clarify our values. Before telling his disciples to “ask and you will receive…,” Jesus urges them to “seek first his kingship over you, his way of holiness, and all these things will be given you besides” (Mt. 6:33).

Let us then pray for his guidance and inspiration that every time we lift our hearts and minds to the Father through our prayers, we do it in the name of love.

Jovanni T. Abad, CP
06-18-09