From our youngest days as baptized Catholics, we have been taught that prayer needs to be something that finds an important and indispensable place in our daily lives.
Going to Mass every Sunday was instilled into us as a weekly obligation, and we made no resistance to following our parents to Mass on Sunday mornings. Yes, it was (and will always be) ritualistic, and we got used to the routine of the Mass and its varied parts of worship and prayer. We knew when we had to kneel, when to sit, when to stand, and at various times of the Mass, when to strike our breast with our fists. We made no bones about it.
And soon, we learnt about the beauty and importance of going to the Adoration Room to visit the reserved Blessed Sacrament in the holy place. We were taught to pray the Rosary, and we very often would pray the rosary in the Adoration Room, and soon also incorporated praying the Divine Mercy there too. And of course, we were taught how to pray to Jesus for his divine assistance to help us to go through the challenges and trials of daily life, like when we faced stressful examinations in school, when choosing where we should go for pursuing our degree in Universities, or when we are afflicted with traumatic illness. And the truth is that so many of us are always plagued with such challenges and difficulties in life.
The big question comes when we find ourselves running out of things to say to God in our prayer life. Recently, someone came to me and asked me if she should continue going to the Adoration Room if she has nothing much to say to God that he doesn’t already know. She has brought to God all her difficulties and afflictions in life, and God has helped her in so many ways, and she is grateful for his help and mercy. But she’s now running on empty, and her mind is a blank when she enters the Adoration Room and finds that prayer time is beginning to be a waste of her time. She needed new help in wanting to continue to go to the Adoration Room.
I am by no means a mystic. I do not have an endless supply of wisdom that opens up new areas in the hearts and minds of the sheep of the Good Shepherd that I am to pastor in the parishes I am sent to. But I did bring this question to prayer, and from my questioning, came the clear and simple answer to this person’s question about prayer and adoration. And the answer lies in presence.
The beauty of the Adoration Room is that Jesus is truly there in the exposed Blessed Sacrament. And the reason he turned the bread into his body was so that we the faithful could always be sustained and fed by this miraculous bread in Holy Communion. But there is a deeper reason why he did this – it was because he loves us so much. Love is the reason we are able to receive Holy Communion at Mass.
If love is the reason for his presence in the Blessed Sacrament, then love should also be the reason we go to the Adoration Room to expose our love for God. Of course, we can bring our needs and desires to Him in these holy places, but those are secondary in importance. Love exposed needs to be responded to by love.
So I told the lady who came to see me that our prayer, whittled down to its most basic core, has to be that we love Jesus. Just look at the way that people in love spend their time together. Of course, at first, the conversations would be around how they spend their days, and what they find interesting and even riveting in life. But as the relationship grows through time, these things that people talk about will become less and less, and the majority of the time would be spent in just being in each other’s presence, where love is communicated through their presence to each other. The very sight of each other will bring the joy that they find lovely and irreplaceable. When there are no more words to communicate the love they share, their presence conveys what comes deepest from their hearts.
This truth needs to be replicated in the Adoration Rooms all over the world. And I think that the majority of Catholics have yet to come to this fact of our love relationship with God. He is there waiting in all Adoration Rooms all around the world. The Divine Lover of all time is there waiting to love us, and so many of us are finding so many other things far more interesting than going to the Adoration Rooms. That is why so many Adoration Rooms are empty most of the day. The lover is left alone, much like he was as he was nailed and crucified on Calvary more than 2000 years ago.
So, it shouldn’t worry people when they have run out of things to say to God when in prayer. Just physically going to the Adoration Rooms and sitting silently and wordless most of the time is a pure act of love. It is the time where we can bring our presence to the Real Presence of Jesus. The height of love is when lovers no longer have words to say to each other, but just stand with each other, looking at each other in love, and communicating through their presence their unbounded love for one another.
Do not let your inability to find things to talk about be your reason to stop going to the Adoration Room. Instead, let this uncomfortable silence be the reason we are sustained in our visits to the Blessed Sacrament, because it purifies our love for the Divine Lover, Jesus Christ. It’s no longer about how good we feel that we go to prayer. Instead, it is about how much love we convey to God through our very presence in God’s Divine Presence.
Let love be the reason we go to prayer. This will change the way we pray, and the way we look at prayer in life.
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