How prayer raises mind and heart

by Michael Shackleton · April 20, 2009

I was taught that prayer is the raising up of the mind and heart to God. This means little to my children. Is there another way of explaining prayer?

Psalm 104:27-29 addresses God in these beautiful words: �All creatures depend on you to feed them throughout the year; you provide the food they eat, with generous hand you satisfy their hunger. You turn your face away and they suffer; you stop their breath and they die and revert to dust. You give breath, fresh life begins, and you keep renewing the world.�

We are�God�s creatures, every one of us, including Our Lady and the angels. In prayer we accept this as a fact and worship him as our Lord and Maker. We ask him for his help and mercy in the rough patches we go through. And when we suffer, we consciously unite our pain with that of Jesus Christ who, by means of his passion, delivered us from sin and gave us a life with him forever.

We cannot see God or experience him directly. But he asks us to have faith and believe that he is with us.�Jesus said to the apostle Thomas: �You believe because you can see me. Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe� (John 20:29).

Raising the heart and mind to God is�focusing our thoughts in reverential awareness and love on our Creator. Sometimes our moods get in the way and we don�t pray. But St John Vianney once said that the best way to talk to God in such a case is to speak to him as if he was a man. And of course, Jesus is both man and God, so we can tell him frankly about our miseries and consolations.

We know much about Christ the man from the gospels. In order to talk to him in prayer, we must practise listening to him talk to us by reading the gospels often, which takes a little effort but infinitely repays the time spent at it.

For Christians, prayer is not merely a kind of declaration of our need for God. It is our response as God�s children to the�intimate warmth of his fatherly embrace. This grows the more we pray. We begin to appreciate that he does not want a half-hearted trust in him but an absolute letting go of ourselves into his love.