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Mar 06, 2020 1691 Deacon Doug McManaman, Canada
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Pray, Hope and Don’t Worry

We go about our days, engaged in the home or workplace, distracted by good things that keep us from prayer. When we stop praying things begin to go wrong!

There is no doubt that the more we pray, the happier we become; in fact, the more we pray, the less anxious we become, and we are filled with a greater peace of mind and heart. The more we pray, the more we understand ourselves, for we come to know God more intimately by experience and we really only know ourselves to the degree that we know God personally. The more we pray the more we begin to see the hand of God in our day-to-day life; that is, we see Him acting in our life. We begin to see that He loves us, personally. That makes life so much more meaningful.

Cultivating a Prayer Habit

The most important thing is to acquire the habit of prayer. It has to become a habit. Without that, we do not have an interior life; we just have an exterior life. When all we have is an exterior life we become anxious, restless, and that leads to greed, the inordinate love of possessing. We end up trying to secure our own happiness and to reduce our own anxiety, and when things do not go our way in life we become angry, impatient, irritated, we lose the peace for which we long. When we are at that point, it means we have taken our life into our own hands. Life is not meant to be lived out of our own hands. We are meant to be carried along by God, like a baby is carried in a car seat. We are meant to be carried along by divine providence. God is in control, not us, and we have to surrender to His control. When we do so, life becomes so much more exhilarating.

If we do not pray we open ourselves up to deception. This is such an important point. Diabolical deception is so subtle, and we are just not intelligent enough to defend ourselves against the subtle deception of the evil one. An angel is inconceivably superior, intellectually, to human beings, and the person who does not have the habit of prayer is open to all sorts of deceptions. The goal of the devil in sowing lies and deception in the minds of human beings is to divide them, to create division and animosity. That leads to divorce, or broken friendships, mutual distrust, animosity in the family or in a religious community.

The only defense against that is fervent and persistent prayer, the lifting of the mind up into the presence of God. So much takes place during prayer. When we pray, we enter into the deepest region of the self where God alone dwells. No one is permitted to enter into that deepest region, only God dwells there, and there He awaits you and me, individually, and it is there that He speaks to us in silence. When we enter into that region life often becomes much richer, far less anxious and much more tolerable. What happens is that we are given a new pair of eyes to see the world. The world begins to look different. We begin to see the beauty of the world around us. We begin to see other people from God’s point of view, and when that happens they begin to look better. When we see ourselves from God’s point of view we begin to look better to ourselves and we feel better about ourselves.

What if I Don’t Pray at All?

If we do not acquire the habit of prayer, old age is going to be one difficult and painful ordeal. If a person has an interior life then life restricted to a hospital or an old-age home is not such a horrible prospect, because that person’s joy comes from communing with God in the very depths of his or her soul. Such souls are never alone because they know intimately the God who dwells deep within them. They sense the presence of God within themselves.

It is like being in the presence of someone you love. I recall visiting a parishioner in the hospital who had a stroke, and as I walked slowly into her room I saw her husband sitting there, just looking out into space. Then I saw her sitting there, looking out into space, saying nothing. They did not have to say anything, they just enjoyed being in one another’s company. They did not have to carry on a conversation.

When I was a teenager I sometimes picked up the phone and did not hear a dial tone, nor did I hear talking. I thought there was something wrong with the phone. I would listen, only to discover that it was my mother on the phone with her good friend. They were not talking, but they were in the presence of one another.

That is the point we have to get to with God. When we know His interior presence as a result of the habit of prayer, we are not lonely. We are alive; we are in joy, although on the outside it might look to others that we are bored or lonely.

Are You Living Death?

If we have never prayed, in our old age we will be simultaneously dead and alive. We will undergo a living death. Since we do not have an interior life, we have sought our peace from the outside. Old age renders us incapable of a good exterior life; we cannot travel or go hiking, we cannot go for a swim or a jog or do what we used to do when we were young. I know some seniors who because of their eyes cannot read anymore or watch movies, etc. Life becomes intolerable if we do not have an interior life. When we have a rich interior life as a result of years of prayer, all these other external activities are really quite dull and quickly “get old” next to the intense joys that come from contemplative prayer.

If you have not really begun to pray regularly and wish to know how to start, begin by setting aside a certain time every day and reading one psalm from the Old Testament; it will take five months to get through all 150 of them. Then offer a prayer of petition, and trust that God will necessarily grant you that prayer if it is for an increase in holiness. Then pray a prayer of intercession. God hears our prayers for others and He answers them, in His own way and in His own time, and so we should pray for others, persistently and in a spirit of trust, for our children, our relatives, our enemies, those we cannot stand, those we find difficult to forgive but whom we need to forgive. We should remember to pray for the sick, for the suffering and for the country as a whole, that as a culture we may return to God. Then offer a prayer of thanksgiving, and spend some time in silence.

Eventually we will acquire a profound sense of God in the interior of our souls. After years of that, we will be ready to leave this world and we will not fear death—we will look forward to the day when we will see God’s face directly. That is eternal life, and that is what this life is a preparation for. All this begins in the decision to pray regularly. Amen.

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Deacon Doug McManaman

Deacon Doug McManaman is a retired teacher of religion and philosophy in Southern Ontario. He lectures on Catholic education at Niagara University. His courageous and selfless ministry as a deacon is mainly to those who suffer from mental illness.

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