Pray to LOVE

St. Paul said, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought (Rom 8:26).”  Prayer is a gift of God.  Only God can make us capable of praying as we should.  And we should be conscious of our weakness and our inability to pray.  When the Holy Spirit assists us by His grace, prayer then becomes easy and spontaneous, but when He decides to hold His grace, we experience our poverty.  We experience our insufficiency.  We experience our coldness of mind and heart.

To engage in prayer means to deal with these “problems” but yet these “problems” or these “spiritual sufferings” has a purpose.  The purpose is to purify us from immaturity in our prayer and our faith to be more mature.  We learn, then, to turn to prayer with greater purity of intention — not to find pleasure or spiritual consolation but to please God and to prove our allegiance to Him. 

We need to give ourselves to prayer, not only in moments of joyful and sensible devotion, but also in times of dryness, in times of discomfort, or in times that we just don’t “feel” like praying.  And all this, not just for a certain period, but at all times, every day, all our life.


The Devil wants all of us not to pray.  Because when we don’t pray, we don’t commune with God.  And he likes that.  But when we pray, we commune with God; and he hates that.  He hates all people who pray.

So no matter how difficult we may have in prayer, the important thing is not to give up but to persevere.  In the words of Julian of Norwich who writes Revelations of Divine Love, “Pray with your whole being even though you think it has no savor for you.  For such prayer is very profitable even though you feel nothing, though you see nothing, even though it seems impossible to you." Fr. Miguel Marie Soeherman, MFVA