We Are What We Pray

I have come into the desert to pray, to learn to pray. It has been the Sahara’s great fit to me, and I should like to share it with all my friends. It is immeasurable and contains every other gift within itself. It is the sine qua non of life, the treasure buried in the field, the pearl of great price discovered in the market.

Prayer is the sum of our relationship with God.

We are what we pray.

The degree of our faith is the degree of our prayer. The strength of our hope is the strength of our prayer. The warmth of our charity is the warmth of our prayer. No more nor less.

Our prayer has had a beginning because we have had a beginning. But it will have no end. It will accompany us into eternity and will be completed in our contemplation of God, when we join in the harmony of heaven and are “filled with the flood of God’s delights.”

The story of our earthly-heavenly life will be the story of our prayer. Thus, above all it is a personal story.

William Blake Richmond, The Libyan Desert, Sunset, 1888.

Just as no flower is exactly like another flower, and no star exactly like another star, so no person is exactly like another. And since prayer is the relationship between one particular person and God, it is different for every person. So no prayer is exactly like another.

Prayer is a word of infinite variety, were it repeated into infinity with the same syllables and in the same tone of voice.

What varies is the spirit of the Lord which gives it life, and this is always new.

St. Bernadette Soubirous, who couldn’t say anything but “Ave Maria” and the mystic who can only repeat on monosyllable, “God,” have both the most variable and personal prayer imaginable.

Under the veil of the single word passes alone and entire the Spirit of Jesus, which is the Spirit of the Father.

Understanding prayer well means understanding that one is speaking with God.

Thus there are two poles. One very, very tiny and very, very weak: my soul. One immense and powerful: God.

But here is the first paradox, the first surprise: that he who is so great should have wanted to speak to me, tiny as I am.

It is not I who wanted prayer. It is he who wanted it. It is not I who have looked for him. It is he who has looked for me first. My seeking him would have been in vain if before all time he had not sought me.

The hope on which my prayer rests is in the fact that it is he who wants it. And if I go to keep the appointment it is because he is already there waiting for me.

If he had remained in his silence and isolation, I’d not have been able to break mine. Nobody has ever concentrated for long on talking to a wall or a tree or a star. He’d have given up very soon if he didn’t get a reply.

I’ve been speaking with God all my life; and I’ve only just begun!

There’s another thing to say about prayer. It doesn’t come from earth but from heaven. The cry which fills my breast and makes me exclaim, “God, I love you!”; the force which makes Farragi, the blind Muslim, repeat as he walks on the track at my side, “How great God is!”; the cry of David, “Have mercy!”; the exaltation of Mary, “Magnificat!”; the tear sparkling in the penitent’s eye, “Jesus have mercy on me!”; the sudden ecstatic gasp of the scientist before the wonders of the universe, all these are the words of the Holy Spirit.

It is the Holy Spirit who fills the world and makes us cry, “Father,” and inspires the current of prayer within us. We should respond quickly with our lips and our hearts, full of awareness of the passage of God’s current. We should repeat again and again what the Spirit of Jesus has prompted us and given us the strength to say. Certainly, we can resist him, as we do most of the time. We can close our lips and be silent. If we were attentive to the call we should be in continual prayer.

To be precise, we must add there’s a prayer we can call ours, that is, born on earth in the heart of man. But there’s nothing special about this prayer. Often it’s a bit of spiritual pettiness: asking for things which aren’t for our real good and which would be bad for us if they were granted to us, filling our mouths with pious words of fear, of loneliness or pain. Jesus had already warned us to this: “When you pray, do not do as the heathen do …” if we wish for a comparison between the value of this prayer (let’s call it “not inspired”) and the other true one dictated in us by the Spirit of the Lord, let’s say that the difference between the two is like the difference between what philosophers have said about God, and what the Bible and the church have said about him. After endless argument and deliberation the philosophers hardly succeeded in agreeing on the existence of God. The church has a warm, living, spiritual knowledge of God even if it is obscure and hidden in the “darkness” of faith.

In any case, there’s no point in concerning ourselves with “our” prayer. We know it well.

How often we have been found with our mouths full of it, far from the Spirit of God! How often we’ve taken refuge in it precisely to escape the Spirit of God and his will!

We have gone into choir to recite our breviary, while our duty was to go into the parlor to receive some tedious grumpy bore. We have said the rosary while going to keep an appointment which could only cause harm to our soul. We have lit a candle and asked for money. We have bent our heads in adoration while our hearts were full of impure love.

This prayer comes from earth, not heaven. And on earth it remains, rich only in its uselessness, its deceit.

The prophet will say of it, “I shall put clouds to stop it.”

But I don’t think even clouds are necessary, because it goes no further than the hearts of our blind obstinacy.

Yes, blind obstinacy that can last years. It creates in us a deep-seated hypocrisy which dominates every aspect of our daily lives. A man can go to Mass daily and proceed to exploit the poor; a man who is basically selfish can have his head crammed with ideas for reforming the church.

Basically the answer is simple, very simple. We need only to listen to what Jesus has told us. It’s enough to listen to the gospel and put into practice what it tells us.

In short, it’s the will that counts, not the words.

God’s inspiration searches out our will. The Spirit of Jesus settles where the will desires it, because it is love. And two are needed to make love.

When I bow before his love he is not slow to come; rather he has already come, for he loves me much more than I, poor creature, can ever love him.

And love shows itself in action, as for the Prodigal Son.

Rising up is an act, leaving the pigs is an act.

The soul must say with sincerity, “Now I will arise and go to my Father.”

Carlo Carretto, Letters from the Desert, trans. Rose Mary Hancock, (Orbis, 1972, 2002), 35–40. Used by permission of Orbis Books.