What is prayer and, more importantly, what do we become by engaging in prayer? So often we take a reductive view of the realities in our life, including the reality of our relationship with God. We reduce our converse with God to a discipline or an afterthought or worse and obligation. And yet as we read the fathers, we begin to see with greater clarity that prayer involves a kind of mutual vulnerability. We stand before the Other, God, withholding nothing of ourselves from him. In this, we imitate Him who has revealed himself to us in the most vulnerable fashion. He has drawn back the veil and revealed his heart to us and the depth of his love and compassion. 

Such a vision of prayer precludes are treating it in a common fashion; approaching it like we would any other interaction. However, what we are drawn into from the moment of our baptism is the very life of God, a participation in the life of the most holy Trinity. Prayer, then, becomes an expression of identity, of who we are as human beings and what we’ve become in Christ. Seen in such a manner, an unquenchable thirst should arise within the human heart to remain in prayer and prolong it. One desires to linger long with the Beloved. It is to choose the better part. So much of what we learn, and our taught leads only to the fragmentation of the self. The frenetic pace of life and the desperate pursuit to satisfy expectations that we have for ourselves or that others place upon us distorts who we really are. We are sons and daughters of God, heir to the kingdom of heaven, and the Spirit that dwells within the heart alone gives us the capacity to express the love God Himself has for us.

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Text of chat during the group: