Nurturing One's Soul: Prayer

For many people, prayer is often the most difficult part of their spiritual life. Whether you prefer to pray spontaneously with outbursts from your mind and heart, or murmur the wealth of the treasury of the words spoken by sages and saints.

Some try to do without it for a good deal of the time. They ask me, "Can't I be a good Christian without praying so much?"
My reply is, that your maintaining friendship with God without recourse to prayer and the sacraments is about as likely as your cultivating a steady relationship with a child, or a parent, or a spouse, without spending time with them and talking to them.

To me, and to many, many more like me, it is just common sense. Love is something that has to be striven for, and cultivated. The love of God in your heart is like a newborn child waiting to be fed.
Unless a baby is held, and often, and fed, and listened to, and loved, it will not grow, it will die.

I have had ten younger brothers and sisters, and aside from them, I have attended and babysat and nurtured many children. Everything you do, everything, has to be repeated, again, and again, and again. The child does not learn quickly, because his and her memory is limited. Patience is required as well as persistence.

Children need to be reminded, constantly, that they are loved, that they are safe, that they are not alone. In a similar way, we on our earthly sojourn must put before our eyes and ears reminders of God's infinite and unconditional love for us. Even if babies at first do not understand, that the words and gestures you are prompting from them are names of real things, and that there are causal connections between what they are doing with their mouths and hands and the consequences, you prompt and repeat all the same, in the hope that somehow, that unfathomable mystery called cognition will ignite a flame in their minds and their eyes will be opened.

In the same way, prayers, even from the heart, that does not understand or know how to talk to God (and let's face it, few do), must return again and again to the habit. He must repeat what he does not understand, in the hope that He who holds all mysteries, in an outrageous, scandalous gesture of generosity, will grant that the eyes of the heart will be opened.