Prayer

How do we learn to sit back, do nothing and wait on the Lord?

Through prayer!

I had gone many times to St Charles' Ogle Street and I had seen Fr Alan praying in the church. Fr Alan's life was punctuated with prayers. He taught us to pray through praying in front of us.

I remembered Fr Alan saying, "All Christians should be contemplatives."  What did Fr Alan mean by this.

To be a contemplative means to be able to pray in silence. However, most people I know find praying in silence very difficult.

Fr Alan said when we start praying in silence, the crazy monkeys within us would be doing triple somersaults and we would find ourselves unable sit still, like as if ants are crawling around us.  

Fr Alan said slowly by slowly we would begin to tame our bodies to sit still in front of God and enter into silent prayer. 

When Pope Benedict XVI visited the UK in 2010, he told the young people to spend time in silence with God each day, so they could hear the will of God.

So we as Christians are all called to sit down in silence, do nothing and wait on the Lord.

All easier said than done. It has taken me years to be able to sit down in silence to tame the crazy monkeys and ignore the crawling ants, and wait on the Lord. I can now do it without timers, as alarm clocks, and flow with the Spirit of the Lord.

I have to remember that it is easy to forget and become deskilled and therefore each time I sit down and pray in silence, I know it is a new beginning, sitting with the Lord of love and the Holy Spirit is the one who can really teach us to pray in silence. 

At the end of the prayer time, the spirit within me will let me know the prayer time is up and I awake my senses and say the Glory Be or the Lord's prayer.  I do this during Morning Prayer after the Long Readings and Gospel of the Day and also in the evenings after saying the Evening Prayer. 

So let us pray to the Holy Spirit, and ask God to teach us to pray in silence, to go with the flow with the Holy Spirit and in this way, we learn to sit in stillness, and in the silence we get to hear God's soft voice, experience his love and learn to put all our trust in the Lord.

Amen.