A FEW SHORT COUNSELS ON PRAYER

A FEW SHORT COUNSELS ON PRAYER

1. Set aside a moment each day for your personal prayer at a fixed hour. Be committed to living out this time of prayer and to remaining faithful to it. Even if you are tired or troubled, remain there before Jesus…

2. During prayer, make an act of faith, place yourself in the presence of God: “Lord, I believe that you are here, I believe that you love me.”

3. Pray to the Holy Spirit or sing to the Holy Spirit.

4. In honesty and sincerity, speak with Jesus as with a friend: without great ceremony. Without trying to follow a set formula. Saint Teresa of Ávila says: “to pray is to meet frequently the One by whom I know I am loved, God.” Tell him everything, chat, joke, laugh, adore him, praise him, ask him for whatever you want, complain, ask forgiveness, ask for counsel and strength, pray for others, and so on. All of this without always worrying about the sequence of the forms of prayer used.

5. In prayer, listen to what Jesus says to you. A word, a homily, a teaching may come back to your mind and strike you; you can regard this as coming from God and pray over it. Read a Word and meditate on it: God speaks when we read the Holy Scriptures (Vatican II, DV). (Sometimes reread a teaching, for it is the Word of God explained and it contains many other readings.) From this listening, something seems to strike you, and you feel moved to do it so as to please God. It is like a resolution, for example:

• ‘Pray much.’
• ‘Be love today,’
• ‘Make an effort to please Jesus’
• ‘Begin a new life with Jesus,’ and so on.”
It is like having an exercise to carry out. This is what the Exercises on the Prayer Sheet flow from.

1. Ask for the strength of the Holy Spirit in order to be able to live out what God has asked of you.

2. As for distractions, pray over them, offer them to Jesus without being troubled: a child carried by his mother is not always obliged to fix his gaze on her. Sometimes, while he is in his mother’s arms, he tries to pick up things off the ground or looks elsewhere, but his mother loves him all the same and even holds him more tightly in her arms. So do not panic over your distractions, but calmly hand them over to Jesus.

Henri Bayemi