Prayer

I was descending from Omu Peak, in the Bucegi Mountains, with a few dozen young people. It had not been an ideal hike, and we were behind schedule. The forest made the darkness even thicker as it began to cover the mountain, and slowly, our minds as well.

When I ponder the statement, “Life holds potential meaning under any condition, even the most miserable,” the story of an anonymous woman comes to my mind. She made a deep impression on me and taught me about two existential states: having, and being.

The realm of tears is so mysterious! - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We’d been married only a few weeks when we discovered that growing our spirituality as a couple was going to be much more complicated than the instructions on the packet suggested.

"Suppose I go to the Israelites…and they ask me, ‘What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them? God said to Moses, 'I AM who I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you'" (Exodus 3:13-14).

One day, Jesus’s disciples—who followed Him about, observing His every word and action—asked Him to teach them how to pray.

Centuries ago, the German theologian and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz used the term “theodicy”1 for the first time—“God’s justification”. By theodicy, Leibniz meant the ultimate reality of justification, once and for all, of God and all of His ways before the whole universe.

When we think of gratitude and a lack of gratitude, the biblical scene that comes to mind is the healing of the ten lepers, of whom only one, a Samaritan, returned to thank the Saviour, worshiping and praising God in a loud voice (Luke 17:15-16).

It could be a perfunctory ritual, passed down through generations; a mechanically recited poem. But equally, the mealtime prayer can be a genuine spiritual exercise.

Many families who feared that the new coronavirus would affect their health ended up dreading its effect on something seemingly even more difficult to protect: the well-being of their relationship.

Many times we don’t have the patience to wait for an answer to our prayers, and other times we don’t even know when we've received it. For the ten Boom family, the answer to some prayers came 100 years later.

This coronavirus crisis has, for me, some perplexing parallels with a well-known incident narrated in the Gospel of Matthew (14:22-33). The disciples are confined in a little boat in the middle of a terrible storm, almost as we are confined at home today by the emergency laws of our countries.

A major crisis pushes us to re-evaluate the way we see and do things in the fields of health, finance, and social interaction. But how does this crisis affect our religious practices—especially the most common of these, prayer?

The way we pray in public reveals what our secret prayers are truly like. Beyond mere words, it is our attitude and motivation that give meaning and substance to prayer.

Whenever we acknowledge that our prayers have become a boring exercise rather than a real conversation with a real person, it’s time to explore creative, tried and tested methods to rebuild a meaningful, enthusiastic and transforming prayer life.