By Fr. Roy Cimagala *
“Jesus went up to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God.”
(Lk 6,12)
What a tremendous fact in the life of Christ for us to consider! We should be
edified by that example. Christ is God and therefore has no need to pray. Yet he is also
man and as such is in need of prayer as a way to be always in touch with God, as any
man should be.
What we can adduce from this fact is that, like Christ who is the pattern of our
humanity, we are supposed to be men and women of prayer. We need to do everything
for us to make this ideal a reality in our lives.
We have to realize that prayer should always have priority over all other activities
we have during the day. Better said, we have to learn how to convert everything into
prayer so that we can say that our whole life is a prayer itself, as it should be.
And that is always possible because all we have to do is to fulfill our duties and
responsibilities out of love for God and neighbor, doing them in the best way we can, for
such is the way of love. And the duties and responsibilities we have are the usual tasks
we do everyday.
It’s when we pray that we manage to relate who we are, what we have, what we
do, etc. to our ultimate end which, to be sure, is not something only natural but is also
supernatural. Nothing therefore can rival the importance of prayer. In other words,
prayer is irreplaceable, unsubstitutable, indispensable. It’s never optional, though it has
to be done freely if we want our prayer to be real prayer.
Of course, we also have to understand that prayer can lend itself to many
different ways. There’s vocal prayer, mental prayer, contemplative prayer, liturgical
prayer, ejaculatory prayer, etc. It can adapt itself to different situations and conditions.
The absolutely important thing that makes prayer real prayer is when we manage
to give all our mind and heart to God in whatever thing we do or in whatever situation
we may find ourselves in.
We have to be reminded that the quality of our prayer determines in the end the
quality of our life. How our prayer is will somehow shape how our life will be.
And that’s simply because our prayer is the basic way of connecting with God who is the source and keeper of our life, and in fact, in whose image and likeness we have been created, and whose life we are supposed to participate.
In other words, the ideal life we ought to have is when our life enters into the very
life of God. And that ideal is basically pursued in our earthly sojourn through our prayer
which is how we first and last relate ourselves with God.
If we do not have a life of prayer, the best thing that can happen to us is to simply
lead an animal life. It might be a rational life too, but it would only be up to there at its
best state, which is not yet what is ideal for us. And certainly, that rationality would be
erratic.
We should do everything to cultivate a life, if not, a culture of prayer. Let’s take
the challenge. We should not just acknowledge this need. We have to attend to it with
an appropriate action plan.
* Chaplain Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
