In Lent’s middle stretch, when prayer can falter, the saints call us back to deeper communion with the God who dwells within us.
Prayer is all about communion. It is a conversation with the living and true God, who is communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. During Lent, we are invited to draw intimately close to this communion and realize its power and proximity. Unfortunately, the middle of Lent can become a challenge, and we can lose our way. Thankfully, the saints have provided countless words on how to reorient our lives — and our Lent — toward union with the living God.
St. John Damascene said, “Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God.” Prayer, then, is the acceptance — the RSVP — to God: to make time for him and to give him intentional intimacy. Intimacy literally means “close familiarity or friendship” or, most simply, “closeness.”
Prayer is not when we draw near to God. It is when we give him permission to draw so close to us that we are surrounded, externally and internally, by him who is Love itself. Prayer is not our work. Even the decision to speak with God for a moment is enabled and facilitated by his stirring of the heart, drawing us into his inner life.
In her little-known “Varanasi Letter,” Mother Teresa wrote these words to her religious sisters:
How can we last even one day living our life without hearing Jesus say ‘I love you’? — impossible. Our soul needs that as much as the body needs to breathe the air. If not, prayer is dead — meditation is only thinking. Jesus wants you each to hear him — speaking in the silence of your heart. … Not only he loves you, even more, he longs for you. He misses you when you don’t come close. He thirsts for you.
For prayer to be alive, it must be experienced as loving intimacy — closeness with the God who would do anything to be near to us. All we must do is make room for God so that we can experience him more fully and hear him call us by name.
In one of his meditations, St. Francis de Sales notes that God “gave you understanding that you might know him, memory that you might think of him, a will that you might love him, imagination that you might realize his mercies, sight that you might behold the marvels of his works, speech that you might praise him.” So this Lent, let us make more time and room for God, so that we can hear of his love for us. Then our prayer will truly come alive, because we are made in God’s image and likeness.
God is perfect relationship. If prayer is communion with God, and heaven is perfect union with him for eternity, then there is nothing more important than growing in prayer.. St. John of the Cross once wrote that “everyone knows that not to go forward (in prayer) on this road is to turn back, and not to gain ground is to lose.”
The question then becomes: How does one grow in the spiritual life?
St. Francis de Sales wrote: “Those who believe themselves to be far advanced in the spiritual life have not even made a good beginning.” First, we must admit, in utter humility, that we most likely do not pray enough or with sufficient intentionality. We must ask for the grace — literally translated as God’s gift of himself, which we can never merit — to grow in prayer. For since prayer is union with God, and God dwells within us by virtue of our baptism, we must become more aware of his indwelling if we wish to encounter him more deeply in prayer.
St. John Vianney said, “Prayer is the inner bath of love into which the soul plunges itself.” In this way, it is more precise to say that prayer is the acknowledgement of God dwelling within us, rather than the awareness that he is beside us when we pray.
The goal of the spiritual life is to make everything we do a prayer. So we must take the time to set aside specific and substantial periods of our day devoted to prayer. Over time, this becomes the soil in which we begin to pray like Mary, who “pondered all of these things in her heart” (Luke 2:19). The Greek word used for “pondering” is symballousa. It literally means “throwing together.” We can pray at each moment by throwing our hearts toward God and remaining open to receiving his presence, which is always pursuing us.
In this way, our prayer life will move forward and gain ground, as St. John of the Cross urges us. For he is intimately close to you — he dwells within you. Let us turn that over in prayer, as Mary would, so that Lent can become a time of deep prayer and transformative renewal.