“Pray without ceasing”
What is prayer:
For us, prayer is the state through which man passes over to God, and through which God looks upon us. By its action, as Metropolitan Paul Yazigi says, it is a feeling of the presence of God every moment in all the domains of our lives. Prayer brings us into an experience with God, and brings into us many changes, the most important of which is our view of matters, for we no longer see the affairs of life and their problems according to our thought and our ability but with God’s eyes, His perspective, and His view. Prayer is the moment of entering into change.
Its work:
It first clarifies and reveals our error, for we suppose that God is far from us and that we summon Him by repeating words. So it reveals to us that God is present with us, not far and not absent, but waiting for us to share with Him what happened, so that He may share with us how He sees. Prayer helps us to perceive the blind corner, for God sees that corner which we cannot see, since our vision of everything is inevitably tainted by the incompleteness of vision; the scene cannot be completed and grasped perfectly by us alone. God makes us see with His eye and with a larger angle.
God’s role and our role:
This change in vision never means relinquishing our role in daily life and our responsibilities, for God is not a genie who does our work and fulfills our requests; rather He is a partner. Therefore He created man so that they work together, “My Father works and I work.” Resorting to prayer with the aim that God alone manages our lives makes us dependent, sinning against ourselves and against Him. And on the other hand, what merit would we have in the struggle if God were to solve all the problems and make the change Himself?
Then through dependence we make God like a genie, and prayer like sorcery or like rubbing the magic lamp, so that God comes out to fulfill our wishes and solve our problems. This is the state of one who wants to write with ink without paper, and we make of the Gospel of Jesus a gospel of pleasure (we want compensation, and we want money, and we want success…etc.
The following example speaks to us:
In the story of Mother Brigitta’s convent in 1953 in Bologna, in the days of communism that fought the Church, her convent was exposed to many problems and great accusations, as was the habit of communism toward convents and nuns, such as espionage, kidnapping, and treason, and many others. The mother stands in fear and panic searching for solutions to all these great problems, so she announces a chapter of the convent to resolve the difficulties, and she stands before the Virgin in fear, praying to her and asking her help and that she solve what had become too hard for them, for she had no solution that would end the difficulties. So she takes an icon of the Virgin called (Our Lady of Czestochowa), an icon black in color because of its age, and says to the Virgin: you are the superior general, so preside over our meeting. She placed the icon on the president’s chair in the meeting, and after a little speech silence prevailed, and amid astonishment the (black) icon began to light up and began to shine, and suddenly a dark blue protrusion burst from its middle, and the icon began to renew itself and its colors and splendor were manifested. After an hour the renewal of the icon stopped, and a part of it remained un-renewed, and everyone was waiting for the end of the renewal, but the mother laughed and said ” The matter is settled, my daughters,” and added: “the people of heaven are exceedingly astute, and of abundant cheer.”
After the end of the miracle, the nuns left the convent in haste, without any discussion of the intractable problems. The mother was asked: what about the problems, have they vanished? She said: matters went in the easiest way; the problems did not vanish, of course, but we gained the ability to discern the solutions through it.
Clarification:
Everyone was waiting precisely for that corner to be renewed completely, and this was the blind corner for them, and the field of God’s vision. The remaining of a part of the icon without renewal is proof of the miracle that occurred, and that the nuns did not replace the icon. The second notable thing is that the problems did not end and were not solved by a heavenly power; rather through it they were able to discern solutions and the ability to solve them and deal with them.
Conclusion:
Prayer is precisely this new state that the mother experienced with her nuns. She was waiting for solutions from heaven by a miracle, but this did not happen. Even Jesus, before the crucifixion, experienced this state ” take this cup away from Me, but not My will but Your will”. The meaning of Your will: not as You want, but as You see (the coming salvation), not as I see (the coming pain). Had Jesus retreated before the cross and ascended, what would remain for us of Jesus? For Jesus’s view here is no longer a human view that sees the problem: the cross and the pain; rather the solutions through the cross: salvation, and the supreme result: the resurrection. Miracles will not happen; rather changes in us, so that we change our horizon and our vision.