Last week, I wrote about the apparitions at Akita, Japan, and the recent message given to the visionary, Sr. Agnes. If you haven’t read last week’s column, I’ve posted it to my personal website, frcory.org, as I will with all my columns going forward.
Although the 3 acts of prayer, penance, and sacrifice encouraged by the recent message are largely connected, they’re worth considering separately. They do feed into each other, and together help us to grow as Christians in love of God and neighbor.
Prayer is not an easy thing. St. Paul tells us in Romans 8:26, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” Prayer is ultimately an openness to God; allowing ourselves to enter into His presence, and love Him, and be loved by Him. It’s been said many times that prayer is a conversation with God, which is true, but the deepest prayer is the silent conversation in which no words are spoken. This is where the Holy Spirit is allowed to “speak” on our behalf.
Most of us aren’t there. In fact, very few saints ever achieved the level of deep, contemplative prayer. For most of us, we struggle to do basic prayers we learned as children, and find a devotional life difficult. So, how do we enter into the kind of prayer requested in the message from Akita?
First, we start from where we’re at, but be more conscious of our prayer life. Prayer is something that should be constantly doing, but should not be on autopilot or ignored. Some people can pray constantly, especially with little emotive prayers throughout their days, but most of us still need to consciously choose to enter into prayer. Also, prayer should be treated as a priority, and not an afterthought.
Second, we need to push ourselves further. If we don’t spend much time in prayer, we need to make an effort to block off time daily for prayer. If we’re currently praying some memorized prayers each day, perhaps we need to focus more on silent times between individual prayers. This is just a couple examples, as we all are at different points in our prayer lives, but all need to move forward in our prayer journey.
Third, silence must be a part of our daily prayer. Distraction in prayer has always been a concern, but I would argue today’s culture of noise has made attention in prayer more difficult. Yet, if we are to deepen our relationship with our Heavenly Father, we need to learn how to enter into silence and be comfortable with it. This doesn’t mean we won’t be distracted, but learn how to bring distractions into prayer.
This is just a short starting point on how we can develop and deepen our prayer life. There is far more that could be talked about as we seek to enter into that deep contemplation of God. It is important, however, that we heed this call for prayer, especially praying the powerful prayer of the Rosary. More on this next week as we discuss the call for penitential acts.
