Prayer, as one might expect, is at the heart of Eastern Spirituality. I have shared, over the past several weeks, different types of prayer. There is another form of one-to-one prayer that is called Prayer of the Heart. It is a deeply personal prayer born of a person’s solitude and   interior life. So quite   naturally it speaks the language of silence, the language of the heart. This form of reaching out to God is not mysterious, remote or limited to a few chosen people. Some of the great spiritual fathers and mothers call this form of prayer, mental prayer. One mystic wrote: “To my mind, mental prayer is nothing else than taking time to be alone with the one we know who loves us.” This same mystic wrote that this type of prayer is a matter of time, presence, solitude and experiencing love.

Many of you may have already reached out to God in this way. We can identify moments when nothing special happened, but when we had a sense of the presence of God. This form of prayer is satisfying because we know with our heart that we are loved and that we in turn love. This makes sense since prayer, as I have stated, is having a real conversation with someone we love. Of course we have to develop an image of God not as a judge or as a punisher in order to have this type of relationship. If we fear God as the One who can condemn our souls to Hell for eternity, it becomes difficult to have a relationship with Him.

Jesus suggested that one way we can have a better relationship with God is to see Him as Abba – Father. Of course if our experience of our earthly father is not good, we probably will not be able to see God in this light. We humans tend to project onto God the characteristics we experience in life. If we were/are fearful of our fathers, we will probably be fearful of God. If we expect our fathers to rescue us from life, we will probably have the wrong idea about God.

We believe that God is within us and within our world. He is here to be with us through all of life’s experiences!