The personal and profound encounter with God in prayer signifies our whole existence. Recognizing in him the author of grace grants us the possibility of loving as children, of losing ourselves in his gaze, to the point of becoming a living prayer.
[…] As we know, our spirituality, personal and communal together, leads us to extend our love vertically, as we say today, towards God and horizontally towards our neighbor; and the resulting holiness is given by the balanced presence of these two loves.
But it is easy for some (and the tendency towards activism is demonstrating it) to develop the horizontal dimension of love in a particular way and, perhaps, not so much the vertical one.
It is true that we turn everything we do to him in general: it is for him that we love, that we work, that we suffer, that we pray …
But, if by continually “making ourselves one” with our neighbors we have often come to love them also with the heart, are we sure that we also love God not only with the will, but together with the heart?
At the end of our life we will not be able to present ourselves to God together with others, to the community, but we will have to do it alone.
And are we sure that, in that moment, all the love collected in our heart, during our existence, will pour out spontaneously, as it should be, on the One we should have always loved and whom we will meet and judge us?
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That moment will certainly come for us too and, keeping it in mind, we should from now on try to deepen our relationship with God better and to the maximum.
Indeed, one can love as servants and do everything the master wants without speaking to him; or one can love as children with the heart, filled by the Holy Spirit, with love and trust in one’s Father: that trust that leads us to speak often with him, to tell him all our things, our resolutions, our projects; that confidence, that divine desire that leads us to look forward to the moment dedicated exclusively to him, to get in touch with him.
It is prayer, true prayer! It is to it that we must strive, up to the point of being living prayers.
There is a beautiful phrase from the theologian Evdokimovspeaking of prayer: “It is not enough – he says – to have prayer, one must become, be prayer, build oneself in the form of prayer …” ¹.
To build oneself in the form of prayer, to be prayer, as Jesus wants, who said: “It is always convenient to pray” ².
I believe that in the hearts of many of us there is a true patrimony of supernatural love that can transform our life into authentic prayer, that can build us into prayer. It is a question of collecting it at the right times.
In this next time let us then commit ourselves to speak often with God, even in the midst of activity. We try to improve precisely in this.
Just saying a “For You” before each action transforms this into a prayer.
But that’s not enough. We begin a close conversation with him whenever possible. Only in this way, at the end of life, will expressions of love for God, similar to those of the saints, blossom on our lips. […]
Chiara Lubich