How Do I Pray?

Someone asked me recently about how to pray.  Many questions about our Faith involve complex answers.  The answer to the question of how to pray is actually much simpler than people think.  Prayer is conversation with God.  If you know how to do conversation with people, then you know how to pray.  Yes, there are formal prayers like at Mass and in devotions, but the type of prayer to which most people are referring is personal prayer.  This simply involves speaking to Him from your heart like you would to a friend.  Be as honest with Him as you would be to your best friend.  Even if He already knows what’s on your heart, He wants you to tell him anyway. And the more you do it, the more purified your heart becomes. 

As I preached about this past weekend, it’s best to go out of your way to pray.  Go where He is.  You can certainly pray anywhere, and there are some seriously peaceful and beautiful places in nature to converse with God.  But the best and most efficacious place to pray is in the Real Presence of the Lord in a church or chapel.  Just like with a friend, it’s more intimate and meaningful to be in the presence of the Lord.  And it really helps with hearing Him! 

Again as I preached, we can hear God in different ways: prayer, Scripture, the Church / other people, and our experiences.  Prayer might be the hardest because of how nebulous it can seem.  If we do hear something in prayer, we painstakingly wonder if it was God’s voice or ours.  If we don’t have confidence as pray-ers, then we will probably decide it’s our voice.  The more we pray, the more confident we get at it.  And the more confident we get, the more open we are to believing that God can speak to us (in a whisper to our hearts; 1 Kings 19:12). St. Teresa of Avila said, “Jesus is always speaking to us.  The question is, are we listening?”