God is so in love with you that God is where you meet God.  God is where you can be with God.  Amazing, really truly amazing, that Creator God is ever present to you where you are. 

I have been revisiting Thomas Merton’s writings.  Reading his words requires that a pen and flags be in my hand.  Recently while I was praying, next to me was Thomas Merton: Essential Writings; I picked it up and opened to the page where a small pink flag stuck out.  His words name how our prayer lives – the exploration and discovery of God’s freedom, illumination, and love – deepen our awareness of Christ in our lives.[1]    He goes on to say that a lack of a prayer life produces individuals who when they attempt to act and serve others will not have anything to give others.  Without deepening our self-understanding – the inner knowledge of why and how we act – we will lack freedom, integrity, compassion, even capacity to love ourselves so we can love others.  This is another intersection of our spirituality and psychology. 

Without a prayer life, our communications will be layered with more sports stories than parables, more ego-based ideas than Jesus-based teachings, more doctrinaire prejudices than freedom birthed in truth.  Without a daily prayer practice we, each of us, are at risk of the same distortion, delusions, deceptions that we are currently seeing in some of our Christian leadership. 

Jesus cautions us we can heal the sick, prophesy, cast out demons, do many deeds of power in the name of God and have hearts which are unknown to God.[2] I suggest this is a vast lack of a relationship built on prayer which opens our hearts to a God who knows you, knows me, and knows our hearts. 

Come, let’s return to our prayer closets, prayer corners, and to the very activity of prayer.  Let us turn away from the constant doing that is so valued by our culture and develop being with God as vital to our spirits and lives.


[1] Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton: Essentials Writings. (Maryknoll, NY, Orbis Publishers, 2000), p. 86-7.

[2] Matthew 7:22-23, NRSV.