A Parish Catechist

Prayer is communication, a relationship with God. A few thoughts about this prayer relationship and about our role of surrender within this prayer relationship:

Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10).

Relationships are two-way, interactive.

We typically wouldn’t call someone on the phone and have a one-way communication whereby we solely speak to the other person without giving the other person an opportunity to speak, then hang up. Just as human communication is a two-way process, our prayer time with God is meant to be a two-way relationship; we communicate to God and receive God’s communication to us.

In order for us to have a two-way prayer relationship with God, we have to listen to – and be present to – God’s presence in our lives. God wants to have a relationship with us.

How do we go about listening to God’s presence in prayer? My own experience with this is reflected in both Psalm 46:10 (“Be still and know that I am God”) and Contemplative Outeach’s concept of “resting in God’s presence.” Can everyone expect to hear God’s voice in the sense of hearing human language spoken to us by God? Hearing spoken language directed to me by God isn’t something I experience. What I personally experience in prayer is feeling God’s presence; feeling loved by God, feeling that God is directing the course in which I move in life because I am allowing God to do so – this “more than suffices” in my view as two-way communication. The love found in God’s presence provides “peace that passes all understanding” (Phillipians 4:7).

It is in our surrender that we win…..

Our relationship with God is a relationship that happens only when we choose to participate in such a relationship. Again, God the creator wants to have a relationship with us. We have free will; no relationship is a true relationship when it is forced – rather, God gives us the option of whether we are willing to have God be present in our lives.

Our God-and-us relationship is one of creator-and-created, parent-and-child.

Within this creator-and-created relationship, there is a natural place for our surrender to God as our leader-who-molds-and-fashions-our-will-toward-good.

Despite our western ideas about individual autonomy and self-agency, us permitting God’s agency to mold and shape us is liberating. God loves us, wants good for us and our world, and and has capacity for transformational good beyond our comprehension. There is no room for a negative outcome when we allow God to work within and through us.

He must become greater, I must become less (John 3:30).

When we allow God to work in and through us, this leads naturally toward life becoming about God – and, by extension, us focusing on God’s other children – rather than our life being about us. We move out of the way, more of our being becomes about God’s presence within us. Rather than us being me-centered, we become God-centered. In time, this turns into “It is no longer I, but God who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). As a result, we experience the “peace that passes all understanding” (Phillipians 4:7).

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages. If you are a new visitor, you are invited to click through and start following this blog (thank you!).