If you were asked to give your opinion about the most important or most essential element in really good, deep prayer, I wonder what you would say. Of course the desire and intention of praying and love for God as well as faith and hope are essential, but what I am asking is, what is the most essential component in the prayer itself; what action is more important than any other? Different people would probably give different answers to this question.
I suppose those who are gifted with a very talkative temperament and who are never lost for something to say whenever you meet them might regard never letting the conversation cease when praying to God as the most important thing about it. But they seem to say, “Listen, Lord, because your servant is speaking.” . . .
I dare say that some people who are great thinkers or great scholars might be tempted to think that the most important thing about praying well is having the right kind of thoughts, clever ones, or deep ones, or inspiring ones. . .
Some books on mental prayer give us the idea that the most important element in prayer is the good resolutions that come out of it. Well, of course, like everything else, good prayer has good results, and you can tell good prayer from bad by its effects and perhaps by nothing else. But resolutions are not the only good thing that prayer can produce. So I would not then regard good and effective resolutions as the most important element in good prayer.
Then there are some people who think that unless they feel successful or good at prayer, something is wrong. Because they seem to get nothing out of it, they think it is useless. “I am no good at prayer,” they say, not out of humility but because they pray in the expectation of feeling the benefit of it, and feeling it at the time of the prayer moreover. They forget the principle that “the fruit of prayer is not in the prayer itself.” . .
What, then, is the most important element . . . the first thing to do once we have begun prayer by making an act of deeply reverent awareness of the presence of God? . . .
“Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” That is the essential element in prayer. Listening to God--that comes first, and then responding in some way. . .
If we are going to pray well, we must listen to God, but if we are to hear what He says, we must know how He speaks, by what means His voice or His Word comes to us. How does Our Lord God actually speak to us? . . .
First of all, God speaks to each of us by natural revelation. He reveals Himself in the things He has made. He speaks by time and space and all created things, including our natural selves. Even the greatest contemplatives and mystics were often raised up to closest contact with God as they looked at little things: the stars, a blade of grass, the lilies of the field, a sparrow. Everything that exists is a sign of God, a word of God. “He spoke and they were made.” . . . Listening to what the Lord says through created things and responding is not just a matter of admiring this or that and praising God for its attractiveness, but, in a way, of seeing God Himself in it, or rather, through it. Here God is acting, producing this creature, and doing it by a continual, never-ending act. . . .
Secondly, if we want to listen to God, He speaks to us in a way that enters our hearts and corresponds with a special grace there when we hear or read His inspired word in Holy Scripture. Through the Scriptures God’s revelation reaches us in a special way when we receive it in faith. God reveals His Heart to us across the history of His people. He tells His plans for us. He gives us a light for our footsteps. We can hardly expect to listen to God as a step to prayer if we are not extremely keen on the Holy Scriptures.
Supremely, however, in a way that is unique and complete and absolutely full of light and truth and love, God has spoken to us in His Son. In calling His people to prayer, to living communication with Himself, God the Father expressly said several times while Jesus was on earth, “Listen to Him.” There is no true prayer at all if we are not in some way, whether we realize it or not, listening to Jesus Christ, God’s Word made Man.
Within the framework of these three ways in which God speaks continually to His children so that they may live with Him in continual explicit or implicit prayer, God speaks to each of us individually by an interior voice, an interior inspiration of the Holy Spirit heard in the depth of the our souls, felt in the depth of a good and active conscience. So whatever difficulty we think we have in prayer, as opposed to saying prayers, we cannot attribute it to silence on God’s part. He is never silent, and His voice fills the whole universe and even the abyss of our own interior, which is very much larger and deeper than we realize. . . .
If we find prayer almost impossible or just rather difficult at times, it may very well be due to our being deaf. I want to quote from a sermon of Blessed John Tauler in which he preached on St. Mark’s account of the healing by Jesus of a man who was born deaf and dumb:
“. . . [God] never ceases to speak to us, yet we hear nothing because of the deafness that has taken possession of us. But whose fault is that? I shall tell you. Something has afflicted man’s ears and stopped them up, so that he cannot hear God’s loving Word any longer. This something has also deluded man so that now he is dumb as well as unable to know himself. . . . The reason for this is that the Enemy whispered in his ear; man listened to him, and the consequence is that he became deaf and dumb.” . . .
Tauler continues, “What is this dangerous whisper of the Enemy? It consists in the disruption of God’s law and order. Man is deceived and dazzled, either by means of worldy love, his fellow man’s opinions, or the world in general and all that it stands for, such as fortune or honor or his own nature with its imaginary love and favors from other human beings. We are forced to hear the Enemy’s whisper because he never leaves man to himself . . . Whatever it is that attracts man, be it inwardly or outwardly, the devil tampers with it and tempts man with the faked object. The resulting images bar the way to his inner ear, so that he cannot hear the eternal Word.”
Tauler then says that we can turn away from the Enemy’s whisper and overcome the temptations and receive the gift of hearing the inner voice, and deafness will be conquered. We have to avoid self-indulgence and vanities of all kinds, of course. We have to avoid seeing the word of God in the created order of things in the light of our fallen nature and try to see, love, and use things in the light of faith, a supernatural light. This self-control and proper vision of things will open our ears to prayer. . .
The greatest wonder in the created order on this earth that you will ever come across is the depth of your own soul, the depth of your individual personality, when you live in Christ and He lives in you. When you are able to listen to the depths of God speaking to the depth of yourself more deeply within you than any thought, desire, or expression, you will really know what prayer is. But even at lesser levels, prayer moves us in that direction, and even if hidden under a veil of faith, which seems almost impenetrable, it is a very great gift and privilege and wonder. We do not listen and look carefully enough.
As John Tauler prayed: “May God help us, that our ears be opened so that we can hear the eternal Word echoing through our souls. Amen.”
