FOCUSING THE LOVE

“There have been times when people have told me that they find it hard to pray because they do not know the correct words to use.

When I pray, I speak with God

in the same way as I would speak with a friend.

At the beginning of my time of prayer,

I always ask God to guide me

and to show me who needs my prayers;

in this way, I feel that I am putting myself into God’s hands.

It is a great temptation, particularly in intercessory prayer, to tell God what He should do and how He should achieve it. All we need to do is to hold our concerns before God and allow Him to deal with the situation in His own way, for He knows better than we do, always remembering that sometimes God will say yes, sometimes no, or other times, not yet."

SISTER MARY CLARE SSM – Quoted in “Wisdom from the Cloister -

Reflections from Anglican Religious to help us during these times “ – Church Union

“Prayer is the gateway to the vision of God for which we were created.

It is the means of free and conscious dialogue between the creature and His Creator and it expresses the union between the two.

It is the art of spiritual living and will be incomplete

if it includes only the art of the presence of God

without the necessary complement

of the practice of the presence of humanity.

Prayer is, in the words of St John of the Cross,

'TO PUT LOVE IN WHERE LOVE IS NOT'

This is the real meaning of intercession:

through your own silent attentive spirit,

focusing the love of God where the need is greatest.

There is a Gospel saying of our Lord about prayer

which it is of value to remember in this context (often misunderstood):

‘Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name that will I do’.

We, in our misplaced optimism, which we all too- often confuse

with the theological virtue of faith,

thinking that all we have to do is make our prayer

with the concluding invocation, ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’,

and then all will be well, and God will give us the answer we want.

If he does not we often get confused and dispirited,

like the rich young man who could not rise up

to the challenge of total commitment, and we tend to say,

‘There, I knew it wouldn’t work’,

and then we wipe off prayer

as another of those religious techniques

which may have had their part to play in years gone by

but not in this scientific technological-wonderland of now.

The lesson we have to learn about prayer therefore

is that it is God’s activity in us

and not a self-activated process of our own."

MOTHER MARY CLARE, Sisters of the Love of God, in her publication “Learning to Pray” - originally a paper read at Conference for Roman Catholic Novices at Spode House, January 1970.