Silence - The Other Side of Prayer

Silence – The Other Side of Prayer

Cl. Mario D’Couto SDB

            The word ‘prayer’ for most of us is associated with a series of petitions. We ask God for so many favours and sometimes it seems as though the ‘content’ of our prayer is just that – asking God for this or that. There is, however, another side of prayer which most of us forget and that is silence.
            Imagine a boy and a girl going on a date for the first time. If one of them is going to be talking or bragging about one’s self all the time, it is most likely that one’s first date is going to become a ‘flop show’. In fact, this is one of the ground rules of “First dates”. Keeping this as our back ground, meaningful prayer does not consist in making a series of petitions. Our Heavenly Father knows what we need even before we could ask Him, as Jesus as our Lord has rightly asserted in the Gospels. What we need to do rather is to just feel His presence by sitting in silence.
            I believe our prayer lives is a lot like relationships and one of the basic things about relationships is communication. For just as a fruitful and lasting relationship is a consequent of the communication and the transparency that exists between two people, the same applies in our relationship with God. Relationship is never a one-way traffic.
            Praying involves spending time with God and just as a person spends time with another person whom he or she loves, getting to know him or her more and more closely, the same applies in our knowledge of God. The more time we spend with Him in silence, we will eventually come to discover the love and care that He has for us.
            Now, there are some who may feel, “But how do I know whether God is speaking to me?” It is not very difficult to find out whether God is speaking to someone. God need not necessarily speak in a ‘supernatural’ way. He speaks to everyone in the ordinary circumstances in life. He speaks to us through the birds, the trees, through nature, through one’s family, through the daily encounters that one experience whether it is at work, at games and so on. However, this would be possible only if one is tuned into God and that means spending time with Him in silence. When we learn to value the time we have with God, then we will be able to discern the various ways through which God speaks to us.
            Our conscience is also one of the ways through which God speaks to us. But too often we are constantly pre-occupied with the nitty -gritties of life and therefore we don’t have or rather miss out on time with ourselves and with God.

            Finally, it is important to have a good confessor and spiritual director. In our spiritual journey, there may be instances and events which may seem significant for the right or the wrong reasons and sometimes we are not fully competent by ourselves to judge or discern what is right for ourselves. It is therefore necessary to have a good confessor or a spiritual director who can guide us along the right path in our spiritual journey. If a person like John Paul II, could have a confessor and a spiritual director, who are we to think of ourselves?

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