“Prayerfulness”

Most of us “say” prayers every day: prayers asking God to bless our loved ones and to guide us in the day ahead. We sometimes join our prayers with others, as we do each Sunday when we gather around this altar.

“Saying” prayers in one thing, but it’s something else to be a person of “prayerful-ness.”

In her book The Breath of a Soul, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister reflects on what it means to embrace an attitude of prayer:

“Prayerfulness . . . is the capacity to walk in touch with God through everything in life. It is the internal awareness that God is with me — now, here, in this, always. It is an awareness of the continuing presence of God. It is my dialogue with the living God who inhabits my world in Spirit and in mind.

“Prayerfulness sees God everywhere.

“Prayerfulness talks to God everywhere.

“Prayerfulness submits the uncertainties of the moment to the scrutiny of the internal eye of God. It trusts that no matter how malevolent the situation may be, I can walk through it unharmed because God is with me . . .

“Prayerfulness is fostered by the simple consciousness that God is. That God is near us at all times. That God is closer to us than the breath we breathe. That God is available, a silence in the midst of chaos, a voice in the midst of confusion, a promise at the centre of the tumult.

“If I ask and I listen and I reach out and fill my heart with the words of the One who is the Word, then I will be answered. Somehow the path will become clear.”

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus uses parables to help his hearers realize that God is a living presence in their midst, that God’s spirit of peace and justice is a reality in our homes and communities, that God reveals his compassion in the love and wisdom of the saints in our midst. Sister Joan Chittister calls this awareness “prayerfulness.”

May we develop a sense of awareness of God as a reality in the simple and ordinary course of our days; may we possess the perspective of “prayerfulness” that seeks to make our own the forgiveness of the prodigal Son’s father, the generosity of the widow who gives her last penny to God, the compassion of the Good Samaritan, the hope of the Sower as we work the soil of our lives.