Question 4.74

4.74 How would you describe this life of prayer that you speak about so often?

Each one of us absolutely must schedule time for prayer each day and build up his prayer life. How? I will tell you a little story that offers food for thought.

One day an elderly professor was hired to provide training in efficient time management to a group of fifteen heads of major businesses. This course was one of the five workshops of their training day. The elderly professor therefore had only one hour. While standing, he looked at them one by one, slowly, and then told them: “We are going to do an experiment.” From beneath the table, the professor brought an enormous pot holding several gallons, which he gently placed in front of him. Then he held up a dozen rocks, each about the size of a tennis ball, and gently placed them one by one into the big pot. When the pot was filled to the brim and it was impossible to add another rock, he looked up at his students and asked them, “Is the pot full?” They all answered, “Yes.” He waited a few seconds and added: “Really?” Then he bent down again and brought out from under the table a container filled with gravel. He meticulously poured this gravel onto the big rocks and then gently stirred the pot. The bits of gravel filtered between the rocks down to the bottom of the pot. The old professor looked up again at his listeners and repeated his question: “Is the pot full?” This time his brilliant students were beginning to understand his scheme.

One of them answered: “Probably not!” “Right!” the old professor replied. Again he bent down and this time brought some sand from under the table. He poured it into the pot. The sand settled into the spaces between the big rocks and the gravel. Once again he asked: “Is the pot full?” This time, in chorus and without hesitating, the students answered: “No!” “Right!” the old professor replied. And as the students expected, he took the pitcher of water that was on the table and filled the pot to the very brim. Then the old professor said: “What important truth does this experiment demonstrate for us?” The boldest of the students, who was no slouch, thought of the subject of the course and answered: “It demonstrates that even when we think that our agenda is completely full, we can always add more meetings and more things to do if we really want to.” “No,” the old professor replied, “that is not it! The important truth that this experiment demonstrates for us is the following: if you do not put the big rocks into the pot first, you will never be able to make them all fit later.” There was a profound silence, each one becoming aware of the obvious truth of these remarks. The old professor then told them: “What are the big rocks in your life? Your health, your family, your friends, your dreams, your professional career? What you need to remember is the importance of putting the big rocks into your life first; otherwise you run the risk of failing to do so. If we give priority to junk -the gravel, the sand-we will fill our life with futility, with unimportant, worthless things, and we will no longer have the time to devote to the important things. So do not forget to ask yourself the question: What are the big rocks in my life? Then, put them first into the pot of your daily routine.” With a friendly gesture of his hand, the old professor saluted his listeners and slowly left the room.

Is prayer one of the big rocks in my life? I answer without hesitation: Prayer truly must be the big rock that has to fill the pot of our life. It is the time when we do nothing else but be with God. It is the precious time in which everything is done, everything is regenerated, and God acts to configure us to himself.

Saint Paul often exhorts us to live in prayer and supplication: “Pray at all times in the Spirit. . . ,” he says, “keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints” (Eph 6:18). But at the same time he insists on our inability to know what to ask for in order to pray as we ought; nevertheless, the Holy Spirit comes to our aid and intercedes for us himself “with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).

Prayer is, in the first place, the work of the Holy Spirit, who prays in us, reshapes us interiorly, and plunges us into the depths of the One and Triune God. This is why it is essential to keep silence and to listen, to agree to be stripped of our possessions and to give ourselves up to God, who is present in us. Prayer is not a magical moment in which we present some grievance or other so as to improve our well-being. Interior silence allows us to hear the prayer of the Holy Spirit, which becomes our own prayer. The Spirit intercedes in place of us. What matters in prayer is not our talking but managing to be silent so as to let the Holy Spirit speak, to listen to him sighing and interceding on our behalf. If we enter into the mysterious silence of the Holy Spirit, our prayers will certainly be heard because we have a listening heart. God does not respond as we would have liked insofar as we often ask for impossible things, like children who wish for thousands of presents. Nonetheless, that must not turn us away from God when we have real problems that torment us and we are experiencing the dark night of doubt. Indeed, prayer is not an extraordinary act but, rather, the silence of a child who turns his gaze completely toward God. Prayer is allowing God a bit of freedom within us. We have to be able to wait for him in silence, abandonment, and confidence, with steadfast perseverance, even when it is dark in our interior night.

Prayer, like all friendship, takes time to establish. Prayer is therefore a school that is sometimes difficult. To persist in silence can be like crossing a long, arid desert, without water or food, where we might happen to say with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: “I do not even know any more whether I believe in what I am chanting.” A believer who prays is one who walks in the dark and often remains like a pilgrim searching for light. To pray is to enter into God’s will. Sometimes, when we are in the black night of suffering and confronted with hatred, we may shout as Jesus did: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani” (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) (Mk 15:34). No one will understand the meaning of our shout, because it is a prayer, a cry of faith to our God and Father: it is the cry of Jesus on the Cross, a cry of filial abandonment to the will of the Father alone, as though to confirm the total submission already made in the Garden of Gethsemane. While he was praying, seized with anguish, and his sweat became like big drops of blood that fell to the ground, he declared: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this chalice from me; yet not what I will but what you will” (Mk 14:36).

God loved us first. To pray is to allow oneself to be loved and to love oneself. To pray is to look at God and to allow oneself to be looked at by him; it is truly knowing how to prepare to look at God, who dwells and lives within us in a trinitarian way. This is not just imagery; in truth, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit live in us. They dwell in us in unity and trinitarian communion. One God in three distinct Persons-that is the heart of our baptismal faith. We really are God’s dwelling place. Saint Athanasius explains this magnificently in his Letter to Serapion, bishop of Thmuis: “When the Spirit is in us, the Word who gives the Spirit is also in us, and the Father is in the Word. So it is that ‘I and my Father will come and make our dwelling in him’ (Jn 14:23), as it is said. For where the light is, there is the radiance; and where the radiance is, there is its active energy and luminous grace.”

The soul is the place of prayer. However, in this sanctuary reserved for God, in this house of God, solitude and silence must reign. For in prayer it is essentially God who speaks and we who listen attentively, while seeking his will. To pray is to seek God and to allow him to unveil his face and to reveal his will to us. Certainly we believe that God dwells and lives in us, but very often we never allow him the freedom to live, act, move, and express himself. We occupy all the ground of our interior landscape, all day long and endlessly. We always persist in doing a lot of things, talking a lot, thinking a lot. We fill God’s house with so much noise. …

We have to learn that silence is the path to close personal encounter with the silent but living presence of God within us.

God is not in the storm, the earthquake, or the fire, but in the murmur of a light breeze. True prayer requires us to cultivate and preserve a certain virginity of the heart; in other words, we must not live and grow in interior or exterior commotion, in dissipation and worldly distractions; some pleasures divide, tear apart, separate, and scatter the center of our life. Spiritual virginity, interior silence, and a necessary solitude are the most suitable rocks on which to build a life with God, in an intimate face-to-face encounter with him.

We emerge from this encounter with the brilliant splendor of God’s face on the skin of our face, like Moses when he came back down from the mountain after speaking with the Almighty.