 (c)Mary TV 2011 Time for prayer! |
| May 29, 2012
Dear Family of Mary!
"Dear children! Also today I call you to conversion and to holiness. God desires to give you joy and peace through prayer but you, little children, are still far away - attached to the earth and to earthly things. Therefore, I call you anew: open your heart and your sight towards God and the things of God - and joy and peace will come to reign in your hearts. Thank you for having responded to my call." (May 25, 2012)
"God desires to give you joy and peace through prayer..." God desires to give us so much, so very much. But He is hindered by our closed hearts, our hard hearts, our distracted hearts. He can't give us what we do not want. He must wait for us to approach Him in prayer with trust. He must wait until we ask Him to bless us, until we desire His gifts.
Fr. Jacques Philippe writes many beautiful books about prayer. He writes about our lack of availability to God in this way:
The Problem of not enough time -
"I'd really like to do mental prayer, but I don't have the time." How often this has been said! And in a hyperactive world like our own, the difficulty is a real one and should not be underestimated.
But time is not always the real problem. That real problem is knowing what really matters in life. As a contemporary author remarked, no one yet has starved to death because they didn't have the time to eat. We always find (or rather take!) the time to do what really matters to us. Before saying we don't have time for mental prayer, let's begin by reviewing our hierarchy of values, to see what our real priorities are.
One of the great crises of our day is that people are no longer capable of finding time for one another, time to be with one another. Here is something that causes many deep wounds. So many children are enclosed within themselves, disillusioned and damaged, because their parents never learned to spend time with them, with nothing else to do except be with their child. They look after the child, but they are always doing something else, or are preoccupied, never entirely there, never totally available. And the child senses this and suffers. In learning to give time to God, we will certainly become more able to find time to be there for one another. Our attentiveness to God will teach us to be attentive to others.
Regarding this problem of time, we should make an act of faith in Jesus' promise: "There is not one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or land, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time!" (Mk 10:29). It is legitimate to apply this to chronological time as well: who ever gives up a quarter of an hour of television in order to pray will receive a hundredfold in this life - the time will be returned to them a hundredfold, not in quantity but in quality. Mental prayer will give one the grace to live out every moment of life in a much more fruitful way." (Jacques Philippe. Time for God. Scepter Publishers. p. 26-27)
"God desires to give you joy and peace through prayer..." We are invited by God into a relationship of love and grace that will fill us with all good things. Prayer is the way to establish that relationship. May we understand this call of love and respond with all our hearts. May we become people of prayer as Our Lady desires.
In Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Cathy Nolan Mary TV 2012
PS. Time for God, by Jacques Philippe, is available at www.scepterpublishers.com |
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