Life has to challenge prayer and prayer must question life. The God with whom I relate to in prayer, our most beloved Father, has to “descend with me” to my life. That moment of intimacy that I have lived must persist and take hold in my life, and “with Him at my right side” I must undertake the great battle for liberation.
The God of the Bible is a God of liberation. He is who questions, unsettles and challenges us. He removes our ignorance, our insecurities and our injustices, not by evading them, but by confronting and overcoming them.
He who prays is confronted by a difficult task: how to forgive an offense; or what to do when struggling with the acceptance of somebody he finds unpleasant. It is precisely due to this love for God, whose presence he feels alongside him, that he faces and overcomes the impulse to reject this person. By overcoming himself, his love for God grows (we can say that God “grows” and he gains a stronger presence in his self). This love motivates a new encounter with Him. And thus a vital cycle begins, from the joy of God to the joy of life.
He who prays lives immersed by God and moved by love; he searches for new opportunities and new ways to express love. He has been in the midst of conflict, and close to his breaking point, but he has remembered the fortitude of Jesus in his darkest moments, and he has overcome.
Last week he was agitated and frenetic, however, but, by staying close to the Lord he has achieved the balance of serenity among waves of commotion. Or he may find himself in a conflictive situation in which “human prudence” recommends silence, and avoidance of further complications. Be he is reminded by the truthfulness and sincerity of Jesus, who says what must be said. In this case he has made things difficult for himself but he feels internally free and his conscience is at peace.
We have not placed our faith in just any God, as Benedict XVI says in his Spe Salvi Encyclical, “but in a God that has a human face and who has loved us to the extreme, each one of us individually and humanity as a whole”. His realm is present where He is loved and where His love can reach us. Only His love gives us the strength to persevere because love is creative, the hope we have is in the God Jesus revealed to us, this hope unleashes in us a source of energy to live another way, by not choosing the values of a society that is centered on the possession and competition”.
Prayer is prayer and not daily evasion if it moves us to share in a simple way with others the request that Jesus made to a man he had healed: “Return among your people and show them the wonders the Lord has done for you”. (Mc 5, 19).
Source: “Sensing your Hidden Presence” book by Fr. Ignacio Larrañaga.
