Prayer, a journey

If prayer is dialogue between God and a human being, a dialogue that implies the act of listening to the divine Word contained in Scripture and a human response (a response that that also implies responsibility), we can also see it as a journey that awakens the person who prays to the dimension of communion, with God and with others. Prayer becomes our adaptation to the environment of the divine, life lived in the presence of God and with God, and a relationship with God. In prayer our heart - in other words, the center of who we are - is focused on the One who speaks to us and calls us, and we are de-centered from ourselves and and leave ourselves behind in the ‘ecstasy’ (ek-stasis) of meeting and knowing the Lord. This is how prayer happens: it is the believer’s constant, unending journey toward his or her God, a God we never know completely when we begin, but with whom we have a relationship that becomes during the course of our life and our personal experience. This relationship never reaches a point of complete fulfillment, because prayer is a search for the face of God - the unceasing, insistent search of one who has been taken possession of by a Presence, even if the person who prays may never be able to find words to explain the ineffable experience that made him or her a believer. Prayer, then, is an awareness of Christian life as a journey towards God: a God who is invisible and silent, but whose invisibility and silence are those of the Father. God is not absent; he is the Present One who conceals his presence in silence. He is the Father who, through his concealment and silence, makes his presence a call, a vocation. In this way prayer, a form of communication with One who remains silent and whom we do not see, releases our freedom and our human expression, allowing us to answer God’s call and leading us toward knowledge of ourselves as we are led in our search for God.