I have decided that this article would be dedicated to a variety of topics during the coming weeks. The first week I would like to share some thoughts about PRAYER.

Prayer is the search for God. It is also an encounter with God, and, going beyond this encounter, it can result in communion with God. It is an activity, a state and also a situation, that is a situation both with respect to God and to the created world. It arises from the awareness that the world in which we live is not simply two dimensional, imprisoned in the categories of time and space. Prayer is born of the discovery that the world has depths; that we are not only surrounded by visible things but also by invisible things. And this invisible world is both the presence of God and our own deepest truth. Visible and invisible are simultaneously present. They complete each other in a mysterious way – the presence of eternity in time and the future in the present and also the presence of each temporal moment in eternity, past, present and future all-at-once. Living only in the visible world is living on the surface. It ignores or sets aside not only the existence of God but the depths of created being. It is condemning ourselves to perceiving only the world’s surface. But if we look deeper we discover at the heart of things a point of balance which is their finality.

Indeed the heart of man is open to the invisible. Not the invisible of psychology but the invisible infinite, God’s creative word, God Himself.
St. John Chrysostom said “When you discover the door of your heart you discover the gate of heaven.”

So prayer is the relationship between man the visible and the invisible. This is why we can say that prayer is a search, an exploration of this invisible world which God alone knows and He alone can reveal to us.

All this can be said because when we actually decide to pray, we decide that an invisible world exists and that within that invisible world there is a Being which is beyond all comprehension. Prayer is the declaration we make to ourselves about the existence of an invisible Being Who is the source of all creation.

Further, Christianity says that this Being not only is the source of all things and keeps all things in existence, but this Being chose, out of love for His creation, to join Himself intimately to His creation – to become a human.

God, we believe, chose to become a human being so that He might share with us (1) the true meaning and purpose of this visible existence and (2) the way to live in order to gain all of the benefits of living in this visible world. Having created us with “free will,” He could only attempt to “show us”, through the Person of Jesus, how to make the most of our existence within this visible world. He could not force us to live in any particular manner. He could only reveal a way of living that can result in gaining the fullness of life and understand why we are here