The Goal of Prayer

LENTEN RETREAT
Day 31

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I have to laugh, because I am the last person I would have ever imagined to be speaking about prayer. Growing up, I was hyper, constantly moving, always ready to play. I had a hard time sitting still at Mass. And books, to me, were a waste of good playtime. So, by the time I graduated from high school, I had probably read less than ten books in my whole life. And while I did read my Bible, the prospect of sitting down and praying for any length of time was challenging, to say the least.

When I was only seven years old, I was introduced to the notion of a “personal relationship with Jesus.” I grew up with family prayer, with parents who deeply loved the Lord, and wove Christianity through everything we did. But it wasn’t until I left home that I realized how utterly weak, prone to sin, and helpless I was to change myself. That’s when a friend of mine began to speak about the “interior life”, the spirituality of the saints, and this personal call from God to union with Him. I began to see that a “personal relationship” with God was far more than going to Mass. It required my personal time and attention to Him so that I could learn to hear His voice and let Him love me. In a word, it demanded that I begin to take my spiritual life seriously and pray. For as the Catechism teaches…

…prayer is the living relationship of the children of God with their Father… —Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2565

As I began to take my prayer life seriously, a new joy and peace that I had never experienced before began to fill my heart. Suddenly, new wisdom and understanding of the Scriptures filled my mind; my eyes were opened to subtle evils that I had previously glossed over. And my somewhat wild nature began to be tamed. This is all to say that, if I have learned to pray, anybody can pray.

God says in Deuteronomy,

I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life… (Deut 30:19)

Since the Catechism teaches that “prayer is the life of the new heart,” then choose prayer. I say this because each day we have to choose God, to choose Him over everything else, to seek first His kingdom, and that includes choosing to spend time with Him.

At first, prayer may be a joy for you, but there will be times when it’s not; times when it will be dry, difficult, and displeasing. But I have found that those times, even if they last for a good while, never last forever. He allows us to experience desolation in prayer, as long as needed, so that our faith in Him is tested and purified; and He allows us to taste His consolations, whenever needed, so that we will be renewed and strengthened. And the Lord is always faithful, never allowing us to be tried beyond our strength. So remember that, as pilgrims, we are traveling always through spiritual mountains. If you are on a peak, remember that a valley will come; if you are in a valley, you will eventually come to a peak.

One day, after a period of desolation, Jesus said to St. Faustina:

My daughter, during the weeks when you neither saw Me nor felt My presence, I was more profoundly united to you than at times [when you experienced] ecstasy. And the faithfulness and fragrance of your prayer have reached Me. After these words, my soul became flooded with God’s consolation. —Divine Mercy in My Soul, Diary, n. 1246

Keep before you the goal of prayer, it’s purpose. It’s not to “get your prayers done”, so to speak; a race to get through your Rosary, a mad rush to skim through your pray book, or a dash to whip off a devotion. Rather…

…Christian prayer should go further: to the knowledge of the love of the Lord Jesus, to union with him. —Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2708

One Hail Mary prayed with the heart is more powerful than fifty prayed without. So, if you begin to pray a Psalm, for example, and three sentences in, you sense God’s presence, His reassurance, or hear a word of knowledge in your heart, then stay there in that place and linger with Him. There are times when I’ll begin a Rosary or the Divine Office… and it’s two hours later that I finally finish because the Lord wanted to speak to my heart words of love in between the beads; He wanted to teach me more than what was written on the page. And that’s okay. If Jesus rang the doorbell and said, “Can I speak with you for a moment,” you wouldn’t say, “Give me 15 minutes, I’m just finishing my prayers.” No, in that moment, you have reached your goal! And the goal, says St. Paul, is…

…that [the Father] may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Eph 3:16-19)

So that your heart, like a hot air balloon, may expand to contain more and more of God.

And so, as we said earlier in this Retreat, don’t be your own judge of your interior progress. It is has been discovered that tree roots grow far more in the freeze of winter than we realized. So too, the soul that remains rooted and grounded in prayer will grow interiorly in ways that they may not yet perceive. Don’t be discouraged if your prayer-life seems stagnate. To pray is an act of faith; to pray when you don’t feel like praying is an act of love, and “Love never fails.” ^[1]1 Cor 13:8

My spiritual director once said to me, “If fifty times during prayer, you become distracted, but fifty times you turn back to the Lord and begin to pray again, that’s fifty acts of love for God that may be more meritorious in His eyes than a single, undistracted prayer.”

…one makes time for the Lord, with the firm determination not to give up, no matter what trials and dryness one may encounter. —Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2710

And so, my friends, it may seem to you that the ‘balloon of your heart” is not filling up as fast as you like. So tomorrow, we’ll talk about more foundational principles of prayer that I am certain will help you fly heavenward…

SUMMARY AND SCRIPTURE

The goal of prayer is knowledge of the love of Jesus and union with Him that will come by way of perseverance and determination.

Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you…. If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. (Luke 11:9, 13)

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