Even Christ had to pray

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

Chaplain

Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)

Talamban, Cebu City

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com

IT’S worthwhile noting that even Christ had to spend the night praying before he made that big decision of choosing his 12 apostles among the many disciples that he had at that time. (cfr. Lk 6,12-16) This could only mean that for Christ to be completely in union with the will of the Father, he had to pray.

There should be no doubt on our part that we too should learn how to pray not only from time to time but rather all the time, if we want to be completely in union with the will of God as we should. Christ is showing us the example, and we should just try our best to follow it. It’s what is proper to us.

Prayer should be like the breathing and the beating of the heart that we need to keep ourselves spiritually alive. It’s what would enable us to enter, start and keep sharing the very life of God as we are meant to do. Without prayer, we would put ourselves in an anomalous condition as we separate ourselves from the very source of our true identity and dignity.

We have to learn to pray all the time, converting everything into some form of prayer by doing it always with God and for God and not just by ourselves, motivated only by some earthly and temporal reasons. This is always possible and practicable because God has designed everything as a form to connect ourselves with him. It’s up to us to follow that design or not.

Ideally, everything should be an act of prayer, whether we are doing our sacred or mundane duties, whether things are good or bad for us, whether we are alone or in a crowd, etc.

Prayer should not be understood only in its sacred, solemn mode. It can lend itself to all the situations and circumstances of our life. It is practicable in any situation. We just have to develop the proper discipline which, of course, will require some training.

And just like any training, it at first has to be taught under a controlled environment. That is why, at the beginning we were taught as children to recite and put into memory some vocal prayers. We may not understand everything said there, but that at least initiates us to the practice of prayer.

Then further steps ought to be made. We have to learn how to exercise our faith, how to meditate and contemplate, how to find a proper place, time and even posture for it. And then how we can have presence of God the whole day, the rectitude of intention in all our actions, the habit of offering everything to God, and literally of conversing with God and discerning his will as we go on with our daily activities.

Let’s remember that without God who is our creator and source of all good things, we can only do evil. We would be like a branch cut off from the vine. We may manage to give an appearance of life and goodness, but without Him, we actually have and are nothing.

We have to be constantly aware that we cannot be simply on our own. We need God and we need to be with everybody and everything else. We have to overcome our tendency that we can afford to be isolated. We should never forget that we are always in communion and we need to make that communion alive and healthy. Prayer does that for us!