Make me feel Your presence
Lord, I have to tell You that prayer is a problem for me. How should I collect my spirit, which is split and squandered in a thousand pieces? How should I concentrate; how can I close off from all around me and within me each entrance from the outside world, appearances, and sensations?
My mind buzzes like a beehive. My ears are bombarded by a million noises. In my eyes images and pictures flash constantly one after the next. And when I close my eyes, my imagination composes and presents me with a sight of many colors.
How should I restrain all of these things, so that I can focus my being and its senses in prayer?
When I speak with someone else, God, I don’t need to make a huge endeavor at self concentration. The other person’s presence is felt absolutely. I see him, I hear him, and I hold his hand.
But You, God, I don’t see You. You are invisible, inaccessible to our sense of vision. Nor can I apprehend You by my hearing. My five senses betray me. How, then, should I fix my attention on Your face?
They say the only approach to this is through faith. But my own faith is weak and pallid.
Do You see then, God, how hard this attempt is for me? That’s why I dare ask You for forgiveness, if so often, for allotting so short a time for prayer, and even then in that time my mind races incessantly here and there, while my soul is besieged by and yields to a whole crowd of things that are completely foreign to prayer.
Empower my faith, O mighty God. Grant me the great gift of feeling Your Presence at the time of prayer. Show Your face to Your servant (Psalms 30:17). Then, I know, the confusion in my thoughts will cease and will stop running toward external things. My soul will be in the clear and beyond any fogginess; its eye will meet the light of Your face, and will be captivated by it.
Oh, that You would have given me this gift! How much more I would have been able to love You then. And how much better would I have prayed….
Years without prayer
How could I do such a thing! God, how could I have been so wrong? For so many years to pass without praying?
A life full of storms and feverish moments without the breath of Your contact!
A road fraught with traps, running alongside bottomless pits, beneath tempests, without seeking Your assistance! What folly this was!
I had forgotten You, Lord. I had forgotten my source, my Life. I lived as one having no hope in the world (Ephesians 2:12)? Day by day the human submitted within me. I saw that I was changing into a machine, whenever I did not become an animal. Horrible!
But You felt compassion for me, O Tireless Hunter after souls. You suddenly lit certain brilliant lights in the darkness. I saw.
I perceived that without You everything is futile and loathsome. Suddenly the value and meaning of prayer was revealed to me. Your godly hands parted the ash and mud that covered my heart. You found the spark. You blew on it to fan it. Your breath transformed the spark into a flame.
The fire burns again bright inside me. I thank You.
But the road is long. I still can’t pray, my God. I feel tongue-tied. My lips are sealed. I try, but I need Your help.
Stretch out Your hand one more time. Touch my lips. Break the seals, and prayer will gush out like a river from my mouth that until now did not know how to hold the best words for You.
My God, make me a prayerful person. Connect me through prayer with my eternal well.
~Taken from Speaking to God, by His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America. Speaking to God was originally published in Greek in 1960 by the Christian Student Union, Athens, Greece, and is now available in English.
