Listening and Praying
“We rise from our prayerful recollection and proceed about our duties, made a bit more hectic by the holiday rush. We are swiftly moving along… The streets are crowded. Then something we see or hear brings us back to our recollection. A phonograph record is playing in a store: ‘Come, let us adore.’ We stop and listen; we listen within ourselves. Then in the bustle of the crowd, totally unperceived by others, we adore. A little later as we are leaving the store, an old woman slowly hobbles along ahead of us blocking the way. We look. She is obviously lonely, a touch of threadbare, a bit confused and frightened by the crowd. We take an extra ten seconds to hold the door for her and to smile. Her face brightens. We respond to her thanks with, ‘Have a nice Christmas.’ A sadness touches her face. She says: ‘Same to you.’ A feeling of pity knocks at the door of our heart. Although she has already disappeared in the crowd, we pause for a second: ‘God, help her, bless her, take away her loneliness…Come, let us adore.’ And so we have listened and so we have prayed. It may not seem like much of an event, but life is really made up of small events, of seconds. We will never learn to live the years prayerfully unless we learn by prayer to live the seconds deeply and well.
The experience described above is a simple one of listening and praying with mind and heart. It is important to recognize that the experience did not depend on the decision to do some act but rather on the decision to listen, to be attentive and to respond. We would probably become exhausted and frustrated if we started out with the resolution, ‘I am going to pray in the department store today because it is Advent.’ Such prayer would be a tour de force and would soon fizzle out. We only need to make the much more simple decision to listen and to respond with mind and heart. Life and its experiences will do the rest.
The example given above is a simple and appealing one. This is the way to learn to listen at the beginning. But we [must] move on to more challenging experiences―to listen to love and to hate, to joy and to sorrow, to peace and to rage. We must respond prayerfully to injustice, to sin, to death, to all the things that a thinking Christian must deal with creatively in life. The stakes are high because as Christians we believe we must deal with all the currents of life prayerfully and in the inner world of mind and heart. The Master has counseled His disciples to pray so as not to faint along the way.”
~Benedict Groeschel
The experience described above is a simple one of listening and praying with mind and heart. It is important to recognize that the experience did not depend on the decision to do some act but rather on the decision to listen, to be attentive and to respond. We would probably become exhausted and frustrated if we started out with the resolution, ‘I am going to pray in the department store today because it is Advent.’ Such prayer would be a tour de force and would soon fizzle out. We only need to make the much more simple decision to listen and to respond with mind and heart. Life and its experiences will do the rest.
The example given above is a simple and appealing one. This is the way to learn to listen at the beginning. But we [must] move on to more challenging experiences―to listen to love and to hate, to joy and to sorrow, to peace and to rage. We must respond prayerfully to injustice, to sin, to death, to all the things that a thinking Christian must deal with creatively in life. The stakes are high because as Christians we believe we must deal with all the currents of life prayerfully and in the inner world of mind and heart. The Master has counseled His disciples to pray so as not to faint along the way.”
~Benedict Groeschel
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