emmet costello online - christ my brother

Christ and prayer

All true spirituality should lead to Christ and to union with him through prayer and love. When we think of Christ as a loving, understanding brother, then our attitude to prayer is not that I have to pray - but rather I want to pray. At the beginning, however, we normally find prayer difficult but there can be no serious practice of prayer which is not accompanied by darkness and a sense of unreality.

We often feel that nothing is happening. Prayer must be seen as an act of love and faith in Christ and because we do not see Christ, it seems to be a monologue rather than a dialogue.
Christ said: 'You ought always to pray'. There are constant references to Christ's habit of prayer, especially before important decisions, such as the choice of the twelve apostles and before his passion. In fact, Christ's prayer in Gethsemane would seem to be the model of all true prayer and has four characteristics:

There was humility.. Mark tells us that Christ 'threw himself on the ground and prayed',

Trust and faith, for he prayed.. 'Father, everything is possible to you';

And resignation to God's will when he uttered, 'take this cup from me but not my will but yours be done';

And finally perseverance. Mark tells us 'he came back a third time'and Luke observes that 'in his anguish he prayed even more earnestly and his sweatfell to the ground like great drops of blood'.
In Paul's prayer there are two dominant themes. Awareness of our adoptive kinship and a loving interpersonal relationship with the living Christ. Paul employs a term to designate the relationship of the Christian to God in Christ which is found nowhere else in the New Testament - adoptive kinship.

We are 'God's son' (Gal 3:6) and also 'heir by act of God' (Gal 4:4). As Christians we must be conscious of this totally undeserved status. God has begotten us by faith and baptism and because we are now truly God's children, we are also God's heir, endowed with the capacity to share in the very heritage of Christ who becomes our brother in the deepest interpersonal relation- ship. Hence the optimism and hope in Paul's prayer.

Finally, Paul highlights the significance of the very element which is a matter of universal experience in prayer, 'our weakness' which leads often to abandonment of prayer. 'The Spirit comes to help us in our weakness for when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words' (Rom 8:26-28). The realisation of our weakness and the need for humanity are so important. Paul tells us that 'to those that love God, all things work together unto good' and Augustine (author of the famous Confessions) adds, 'yes, even their sins'. Augustine is here the perfect example of his own dictum. All the prodigious strength of Augustine came from his humility, just as his humility came from the knowledge of his past sins and weakness. Here, indeed, sin had served.

At all times, let our prayer be simple and from the heart. What matters in prayer is quality, not quantity!

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