WHY PRAY? It’s prayer that energizes me What’s very important to me about prayer is building a personal relationship with God, my intimacy with the Holy Spirit. That can happen anywhere, but there is no second choice to prayer. We have to spend time in prayer. It’s prayer that energizes me. Prayer in community helps. Sometimes it’s hard to pray alone, and I come in community and they help me pray. Other times it’s great to pray alone. The religious life, Passionist religious life has afforded me an opportunity to pray with others, to have Eucharist with others daily, and also to pray alone, really, as much as I want. Prayer is built into my schedule and it’s a wonderful thing. Jesus asks me to give him a dwelling place within my soul I have come to understand that so much in our life is a matter of God’s grace. How paramount, how important is the grace of the Lord asking one or empowering one to achieve ideals or to be a better person! If I had one thing to do over, I would pray more frequently and more fervently for the grace to be the person that I feel the Lord wants me to be, to walk in his ways and to endeavor to show forth his virtues and his love, his kindness. I’ve come to realize that what I do is, in a sense, a reflection of what Jesus is in me. Jesus asks me to give him a dwelling place within my soul and to make over what I am to him that he might live his life in me and continue his saving mission through what I am, what I say, what I am able to do, and what my presence to people means to them. I believe that the Lord begins to give us insight Well, prayer has different facets, there are different ways of praying. My style tends towards contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer is where we take the world we live in, with its values systems and its cultural transitions, everything, and bring that in our own spirit before God. It is a process whereby we are saturating yourself in God and in the culture at the same time. I believe that the Lord begins to give us insight, He gives us a type of wisdom, He helps us to be present in a very special way inside the culture. Then there is also a type of prayer that is basically intimacy with God, it calls us to a much more intense, personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This is very strong in our Passionist tradition. Our Founder had a great belief in the centrality of prayer, in the vitality of prayer for the overall benefit of our lives. I rely on the Spirit of God This Retreat Center Ministry brings me to prayer. Certainly before retreats, I ask that I listen, that I hear— that it really be the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus, who works through me. So it brings me to prayer, because of the privilege to be with people in the relationship of trust that is established here. I do not do that myself, I rely on the Spirit of God. I couldn’t do it, and I don’t think I could even attempt to do it, without being in that receptivity of prayer that calls me to reflect deeper on the Passion, on Christ.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 10:04:49 +0000
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