The Face of Prayer

I spend a week each year at a monastery in Bardstown, Ky. Over the past 13 years, I have spent many hours with one of the monks there named Fr. Matthew Kelty. He is the oldest monk there at 91 and an amazing man. Back in 2002 I was talking with him one afternoon and we ended up on the subject of prayer. I asked him what "true prayer looked like" and he looked at me in silence for a moment with a tight smile I will never forget and said, "Do you own a mirror?" We both laughed and I have never approached prayer in the same way since. I have often thought of my conversation with Matthew. We are made in the image of God are we not? So when we go face to face with God in prayer...we are looking in the mirror. And the reflection is hope and love that is difficult to explain, but we know it when we get it. One of Matthew's best friends was another famous monk by the name of Thomas Merton. He said of prayer, "It's a risky thing to pray and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God.... at the very root of your existence, you are inconstant and immediate contact with the infinite power of God.

There is no such thing as a kind of prayer in which you do absolutely nothing. If you are doing nothing you are not praying.

Prayer is the movement of trust, of gratitude, of adoration, or of sorrow, that places us before God, seeing both Him and ourselves in the light of His infinite truth, and moves us to ask Him for the mercy, the spiritual strength, the material help, that we all need.

The man whose prayer is so pure that he never asks God for anything does not know who God is, and does not know who he is himself: for he does not know his own need of God.

All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death. It is, therefore, a deep and vital contact with Him whom we know not only as Lord but as Father. It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this."

So, I ask you today, "Do you own a mirror?"