newsminer.com

In a quiet moment, a man reflected on his way of life and decided that he could do better.

“I’ll start going to church again. It might help to relieve the emptiness and loneliness I’m feeling,” he told himself.

He visited church after church, but none seemed satisfactory. Finally, one Sunday morning, he wandered into a church in which the sermon already was in progress. He listened carefully as the preacher spoke these words: “We have left undone those things we ought to have done, and we have done those things we ought not to have done.” Whereupon, the man sighed gratefully, saying to himself, “At last I’ve found my kind of people.”

Someone has wisely said, “Our motto does not always need to be, ‘Don’t just stand there, do something.’ Often it needs to be, ‘Don’t just do something. Stand there!’”

In order to fulfill our heart’s desire to meet God within our souls, we must be willing to “stand there,” so to speak. We must be willing to silence our hearts. We must do our utmost to cast off all traces of thoughts and fears that seem to haunt us when we come before the Lord in prayer. “Pause a while and know that I am God,” says the Lord in Psalm 46.

In his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul helps us understand that each one of us is a composite of body and spirit. If you will just look down at yourself, you can see your body. It is obvious — for some of us it is too obvious.

Our body occupies a great deal of our time and attention. We feed it, dress it, rest it and take care of it. We try to do things that make it feel good. A great deal of our life is devoted to our body. This is important to our overall well-being. But Paul would have us understand that there is another part of us that is far more important: our interior being ... our soul.

The deepest level of our spirit — the very center of our soul, if you will — is the level at which God’s Holy Spirit makes direct contact with us. When we pray, we are making direct contact with God at the deepest level of our being. The Holy Spirit and our own spirit enter into union. That was the point Jesus was making when he said that God is within us like a spring of water, welling up eternally.

Many of us can identify with the disciples who came to Jesus and said, “Lord, teach us how to pray.” Jesus himself needed prayer at the end of a busy day and before another one began. Repeatedly in the Gospel, we find this kind of reference to Jesus at prayer. Often the reference follows a long account of something Jesus did or said. The Gospel writer then inserts a note about how Jesus withdrew from the crowds so that he might pray.

Before he chose the disciples, Jesus needed to be alone at prayer. On the Mount of the Transfiguration when he had to make an important decision about his life and ministry, Jesus needed to be alone at prayer. As Jesus prayed, “his face was changed and his clothing became as brilliant as lightening.”

Peter and his two companions were witnesses to this awesome event. “They saw his glory,” Luke tells us. Then a cloud came and covered them and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my son, the chosen one, listen to him!”

The better part of prayer is to listen. Prayer is “don’t just do something, stand there” time. We believers talk a lot about prayer as our means to talking to God and thanking God and praising God. But do we realize how futile it is to seek communion with God in prayer without listening to him?

Take time to listen and you will hear God’s communication of life throbbing and pulsating down into the depths of our being. Take time to listen and we will learn to accept God’s answers to our prayers without reservation. Do this while trusting that God completely understands our needs and our problems — even without our telling him. Take time to really listen, and you will come to see and feel the problems and needs of others as they see them and as they feel them.

The better we just “stand there” and listen to God, the more we will discover our ongoing need to listen carefully to God and to each other. Then we will understand each other better and respond to God and each other in loving ways.

Insight is sponsored by the Tanana Valley Christian Conference.

Bishop Donald Kettler is the Roman Catholic bishop of Fairbanks and pastor of Sacred Heart Cathedral.