Today’s Reflection
Affective Prayer

One of the classic definitions of prayer tells us that prayer is raising mind and heart to God. In essence, that says it all. The problem is that often we raise our minds but not our hearts. Our prayer tends to be intellectual but not affective and we tend to think of prayer more as a way of gaining insight than as way of being touched in the heart.

What is common in prayer is the tendency to talk to ourselves rather than to God. For example: When we are at prayer and we begin to have various feelings and insights, the almost automatic reaction is to begin to speak to ourselves about what’s happening in us, saying things like: “This is wonderful!” “This scares me!” “I shouldn’t be feeling this way!” “I can’t wait to write this down!” When this happens, we end up speaking to ourselves rather than to God.

I was once on a retreat given by Fr. Robert Michel, OMI, a highly respected mentor in the art of prayer. He suggested that perhaps the number one problem in prayer, among those who seriously try to sustain private prayer, is precisely the tendency to constantly talk to ourselves rather than to God. Quoting Leon Bloy, who once said: “There are persons who adore themselves before the Blessed Sacrament,” he suggests that too often in prayer we say things to ourselves that we should be saying to God. In prayer, he says, we should never say things like this to ourselves: “This is wonderful!” “This scares me!” We need to say them to God. The key to prayer, in his view, is to turn from ourselves to God.
 
The pivotal part of that turning is that we must ask God to touch us affectively and not just intellectually. When we go to pray what we most need to ask for is to hear God’s voice within us saying: “I love you!” Nothing would heal us more and nothing would make us “bolder” before life’s mystery and goodness than hearing those words from God.

In the end, that’s what we are all searching for and most need. We need to hear God, affectionately, one-to-one, pronounce our names. Nothing would heal us more than to hear God call us by name and say: “I love you!”
 
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