Prayer that becomes life

Prayer can be a moment in time, but it can be an attitude in life.
Of course concrete moments of prayer are necessary, as it is necessary to show people that you love them through tangible expressions. What is not good is when you do the gestures but without love in your heart. It can just be a habit or a way to show off.
And so it is with prayer.
There are times when we go through moments of prayer without feeling the desire to pray. Nevertheless, we pray because we know that it is a good and a right thing to do. Sometimes no beautiful thoughts come. At times there is even a secret desire for the moment of prayer to come to its end.
I believe that God also accepts this imperfection in our prayer.
We may not feel any excitement, but we pray because it is a good and a right thing to do.
And so it is with life.
Very few are our euphoric moments.
For many of us, the substance of our being is manifested in our everyday lives, a stage so commonplace that no one takes notice, not even we.
When we make the choices that we make,
when we do the things that we do,
when we say the words that we utter not because of any excitement or outward reward but because it is what is good and right, then our life has become prayer.

Come, Holy Spirit

O Holy Spirit, Come, open my mind, open my heart to receive your light.
Sometimes I feel conflicted within, unite the broken pieces of my being.
When I know what to do, yet feel helpless and powerless to do it, give me strength.
The road sometimes may be boring, without any stimulus to get me going, touch the rigid chords of my enthusiasm.
When I feel so soiled, like there is nothing clean in me, come, refresh me with my earliest memory before my earthly life began, when I was in the palm of God's hand.
When the desire to have control of everything is so strong, loosen my grip and let my outstretched hands feel the freedom of letting go.
O Holy Spirit burn, burn my indifference and tepidity.
Let me fly beyond the calculating mentality of this world.
Let me go deep, where superficiality loses its hypnotic attraction.
You are love, let me find my place in this Love.
Amen.

Change

The thing about wanting to control everything is that it is only an illusion. It will never happen. So to invest all our energies and time on it is like wanting to catch a whirlwind.
The only thing we have control over is our self. Yet, how many people do take this seriously? So they spend their time trying to arrange and re-arrange everything outside of them in order to create the perfect world, the perfect relationship, the perfect job, the perfect situation. Some of them end up disillusioned and skeptical. Some of them become controlled by "control". Some of them compromise, begging or bargaining to appease the void that is within, but until when?
The real key to change is "to let the change begin in me".

The view from above

Jesus answered and said to them, Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. (John 3:3)
The view from above gives us the complete picture.
The view from above gives us the right proportion.
It is about taking things from God's perspective.

When we look at life with God's perspective, we know that what happens now, no matter how bad or difficult, is not the whole story. As there were good days and bad days in the past, so it is with the present, and so it will be in the future. The good and the bad, the happy and the sad, they are all part of the colorful mosaic called life.
When we look at life with God's perspective we save ourselves from certain exaggerations that deplete our strength and take away our peace.  We know that what now looks like an insurmountable mountain, tomorrow will just be a part of the past.
So we ask for the gift of faith. We ask God to increase our faith, that is, to be able to look at life with a view from above.

Faith in progress

Faith is my response to God's revelation of himself. This sounds like one straight out of a catechism.
When Pope Benedict XVI said that faith is not about a set of truths, doctrines, norms and practice; rather, it is an encounter with the person of Jesus, he sort of simplified this definition.
Since it is an encounter, faith involves the whole person. Faith is to stake my life, all that I am, in the person of Jesus. This is not something I say once for all. My life should express it again and again and again.
This relationship with Jesus isn't something abstract like a nice theory I accept and adhere to.
However, I do need to know who is this Person I am staking my life on. That is why this relationship must be founded on the truth of Jesus, not on my ideas about him or what my feelings at the moment tell me. And surprisingly, Jesus unlocks for me, too, the truth about myself, the truth about life.
My relationship with Jesus does not depend on my sentiments and emotions, but they do play a part. After all, I am a human person, and emotions are part of the human framework. So perhaps there are days when I feel so strongly that I love Jesus, or that everybody is good and lovable; or some days could be the opposite.
Faith is a journey, and, like any journey, there are moments of heroic audacity and moments of turning back,  as well. Sometimes the journey might look repetitive and monotonous, but it is not. After all, we are never the same person.
And so is faith. It is never the same.
We  can never say that "we have arrived". It is always in progress.
And so is love.
We can never arrive at love's fullness and perfection. We grow in it, day by day. And even what we may consider as moments of regression, are all part of the growing process.
And when we do arrive at love's perfection, then there would be no more need for faith, because we shall see God face-to-face.

Easter

It is Easter everytime we see God present in the ordinariness of our daily life! Then nothing is a random chance, just a meeting with a God who always catches us by surprise.

It is the Lord

Mary Magdalene's encounter with the Risen Christ gives us an insight on our relationship with God.
If there was any woman in Scriptures who loved Jesus best, other than His own mother, surely it would be Mary Magdalene. She was at the foot of the cross when almost all of Jesus' closest friends fled to save their skin. She very bravely set foot early Sunday morning to go to the tomb, as if to properly make the ritual of saying goodbye.
When she realized that the body of Jesus was not in the tomb, she was caught in great grief. Desperation filled her whole being that she ran to ask somebody, anybody, for any information as to where she can find the dead body of Jesus.
This happens too in our relationship with God. Sometimes, God seems silent, or worse, absent. So we try to look for God, to try to go back to the old ways that always worked, with the hope of recapturing the former feeling. We try to hang on to prayer, to rituals or to anything that could assuage the emptiness that we feel.
Sometimes, these work. They give us consolation, and everything seems to be right again in our relationship with God. 
But sometimes they don't work; and the aloneness and desperation just grow more and more each day.
When Mary Magdalene saw Jesus, she didn't recognize Him. She thought he was a gardener. Then Jesus calls her by name, Mary, and it was then that she recognizes that it is the Lord.
God is never absent in our life. He is always present even if we cannot recognize Him. 
We need new eyes. We need to allow God to become God, not confined to our old categories and familiar ways.
What we do is we ask God that in the many ways He may want to manifest Himself, He would call us by name, by that name He whispered as He kissed our heart before sending us forth to planet Earth.
When we hear that name, spoken by that familiar voice, we can say with Mary Magdalene, "It is the Lord". We are home.

For-giving

Forgiveness is a gift. 
It is not earned like a wage. 
It doesn't have to be deserved because it is not a prize. 
It doesn't wait for anything in return because it is not a barter.
That is why at the center of the word forgiveness is the word "give". It is something that is for-giving. 
In Italian the word is more beautiful and meaningful because forgiveness is PERDONO. "Per" means for; "Dono" means gift.
Indeed, the capacity to forgive shows the magnanimity of our heart, a heart capable of giving.