PRAYER AND OUR RELATIONSHIP TO GOD
Sr. Ruth Burrows, OCD
Our deepest reality as human beings is our relationship to God. It is what constitutes our identity as unique persons. What we experience of ourselves and our consciousness of who and what we are is largely illusory. God’s intimate knowledge of us, the divine presence in the depth of our being, this is our truth and our ‘Yes’ to it is prayer. Prayer is God bending to us, offering us love, inviting us to intimate friendship.
This is true whether we know it or not. We cannot be out of the context for prayer because we cannot not be within this divine enfolding and self-offering of God. The holy Mystery is God-for-us, is God-for-me. God’s call to us to receive love and be drawn into sacred intimacy is what defines our humanness. But this relationship can remain undeveloped. A baby in its mother’s womb is in relationship with her but is unaware of it and does not respond to the mother’s intense love and desire to give herself to her child. The relationship with God on the human side can remain as minimal as that of the baby. Love must be freely given, freely received and freely returned. This writing is for those who, aware of this grounding relationship, want to make it the very meaning of their lives and open themselves to its fullest development.
If we really believe in what the God Jesus shows to us, then surely we must understand that our fundamental attitude or disposition must be to receive the love continually offered to us. God is not God-for-us on and off. God is always God, always loving us and working within us to enable us to respond to such love. This follows logically from what we have understood of the Father of Jesus. This communing will endure whenever we are in this fundamental disposition even though not fully conscious of it. I say this ‘communing’ and not ‘presence’ because God never leaves us even though we refuse to receive him. Communing involves mutuality and means we must want God, want to be open to the Holy Spirit’s purifying and transforming action.
Our participation at Mass and our reception of the sacraments are moments full of possibility for intense communing. However, it is unlikely that we will maintain this fundamental choice of God, this orientation and the receptivity for God’s gift of the divine Self unless we consciously advert to it, to the truth of our being, to our ‘centre’ – in other words, pray in the narrower sense of the word, actually give time to prayer, give the relationship our full attention in order for it to be the breath we breathe. If we have understood Jesus at all we must surely realise that prayer simply cannot be one activity alongside others. Prayer is our deepest reality, our relation to holy Mystery, our openness to the fullness of God. At the same time we must see how utterly simple it is. It is literally impossible to say anything at all about prayer itself, other than that it is the Holy Spirit of God giving God to us and giving us to God. This holy communion is, of its very nature, mystery; we are caught up in the holy Mystery that is Total Love.
The almost universal understanding of prayer is that it is something we do, it is our addressing God, our attempts to get an audience, our effort to reach God in some way. But we have seen, through considering what Jesus has to say, that this is only partly true. We are in the Father’s house, we do not have to ‘reach’ God, God has come..to be with us. All we have to do is to stay with God, remain there as the grateful recipients of the most tender love.
Our labour is to believe and never slacken in belief. Our faith must be grounded solely on Jesus and we must learn not to be in the least concerned that ‘nothing seems to happen’, that our senses are unaffected and our minds have no satisfying food and thus wander all over the place. There may, of course, be times when we are supported by consolations, when our feelings are in tune with the truth or our minds receive profound intuitions as to the reality of God’s presence. These are blessed moments to encourage and strengthen us but we must not rely on them. Our feeling state may change, our perceptions vary, but the reality remains reality, and it is on this that we ground ourselves with every ounce of commitment. This blind clinging, this unswerving gaze into the ‘nothing’ that is holy Mystery, is saying in substance: ‘You are God, Total Love. I am yours. Do with me, do in me whatever you please.’ Julian of Norwich has a prayer that, I believe, is a perfect expression of a truly Christian understanding of God:
God, of thy Goodness, give me thyself: for thou art enough to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worship to thee; and if I ask anything that is less, ever me wanteth, but only in thee have I all.
Julian is saying in effect: ‘Give thyself to me not because I am looking, not because I have worked hard to do your will and have given up everything for your sake, but simply and solely because you are who you are, the God who is pure self-giving Love.’ What we are asking for is what does God desire with all the energy of his holy Self to give us and it is God who has made us understand that nothing less will ever satisfy our hearts.
What has been said so far could perhaps be interpreted as implying that prayer is only the real thing when we ourselves do nothing, remaining passive save for the ‘reaching’, the ‘clinging’ or ‘watching’ of faith, and that methods of any kind are to be eschewed. In no way is this so. My purpose has been to insist on the essence of prayer and on how important it is that we constantly bear it in mind. We must convince ourselves that prayer is God’s work first and last, and the logical conclusion is that our part must be to receive.
(Living in Mystery (1996) 96-98)
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