This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
“God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). I want to love the one who created me in his own image and who loves me. Beyond any word, an encounter between the deepest depth of my heart and the depth of God is always possible. In silence and complete openness, I strive to answer his love and to be seized more and more by him in the absolute certitude and trust that he loves me personally and unceasingly.
Jesus is his name. He speaks to me. He walks with me on a path of longing for this mutual love, in a life of prayer, of listening to the word of God, in silence and solitude.
With loving attention, I read his words. I read them again. I learn them by heart. I receive them in my mouth, my ears, my mind, and let them resound in my soul. Solitude and interior silence call for one another and allow Jesus to invade my heart, my thoughts, my acts, and to transform me little by little into his likeness. To live this shared attention to one another is a life of contemplation and prayer. Prayer is the simple and spontaneous correspondence that my heart establishes between its own depth and the depth of God.
A personal encounter
God wants our prayer. He wants loving human hearts whose main occupation is to receive him, to receive his Son Jesus in themselves, in order to give his grace to the world; in order that all the people of God long for a living and personal encounter with him, their Father.
In his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul reveals to us this eternal, benevolent plan of God the Father to save each one of us created in his own image in Christ Jesus (1:3-6):
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.”
Remaining in his presence
Such is the incredible love with which God invites us to live with him. That is why those who want to contemplate God here on earth stay faithfully in his presence in a silent listening, whatever can happen to them in their minds, hearts or bodies. They listen and keep silence because, in the depths of their hearts, there is the very beating of the heart of God, present through their trust and longing for him, their faithfulness to prayer and to offering their life in communion with Jesus, who first gave his own life out of love for them.
“Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn 1:3).
They become receptacles of the life of God, hidden in their own eyes. They are sources of life for the entire world, even if they are still weak and sinners.
Will we receive the invitation to come, to run to the true and only source of life?
“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (Jn 4:10).
“While Jesus was standing there, he cried out, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water”‘” (Jn 7:37-38).
