HOW TO DIALOGUE WITH THE FATHER
When I want to find them I will always look for you in the silence of my heart (Santa Gemma).
"And suddenly you became someone." These words of Claudel at the moment of his conversion could equally be suitable for Christian prayer. Often you ask yourself what should be said or done during prayer and you put into action all the resources of your person: but all this does not express the depth of yourself. Prayer is first of all an experience of being and of presence. When you meet a friend, you are obviously interested in what he says, thinks or does, but your real joy is to be there, in front of him and to experience his presence. The more the intimacy with him is complete, the more the words will become useless or even hindered. Any friendship that has not known this experience of silence is incomplete and leaves one unsatisfied. Lacordaire said: "Blessed are two friends who know how to love each other enough to be able to keep silent together."
After all, friendship is the long apprenticeship of two beings who become familiar with each other. They want to leave the anonymity of existence to become unique, one for the other: “If you tame me, we will need each other. You will be unique to me in the world. I will be unique for you in the world ». Suddenly you realize that the other has become someone for you and that his presence satisfies you beyond any expression.
The parable of friendship can help you to understand a little of the mystery of prayer. As long as you have not been seduced by the face of God, prayer is still something external in you, it is imposed from without, but it is not that face to face in which God has become someone for you.
The way of prayer will be open for you on the day in which you truly experience the presence of God. I can describe the itinerary of this experience, but at the end of the description you will still be on the threshold of mystery. You cannot be admitted to it except by grace and without any merit on your part.
You cannot reduce the presence of God to "being there", to being in front of curiosity, juxtapositions, enslavement or necessity: it is a communion, that is, a coming out of you towards the other. A sharing, an "Easter", a passage of two "I's", in the depths of an "we", which is both a gift and a welcome.
Presence to God therefore supposes a death to yourself, in the claim that pushes you relentlessly to lay your hands on the people of your environment, to appropriate them. Accessing the true presence of God is making a breach in your self, it is opening a window on God, of which the gaze is the most significant expression. And you know well that, in God, to look is to love (Saint John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, 33,4). In prayer, let yourself be seduced by this presence, since you were "chosen to be holy and blameless in his sight in love" (Eph 1: 4). Whether you are aware of it or not, this life in the presence of God is real, it is of the order of faith. it is an existing for each other, a mutual face to face in love. Words then become increasingly rare: what is the use of reminding God of what he already knows, if he sees you inwardly and loves you? Prayer is living this presence intensely, and not thinking or imagining it. When he thinks it opportune, the Lord will make you experience it beyond every word, and everything you can then say or write about it will seem insignificant or ridiculous.
Every dialogue with God presupposes this scenario of presence in the background. Since you have established yourself deeply in this face to face where you look God in the eye, you can use any other register in prayer: if it is in accord with this main and fundamental note, you are truly in prayer. But you can also glimpse this presence to God with three different perspectives, which make you penetrate more and more into the depth of this reality. To be present to God is to be before him, with him and in him. You know well that in God there is neither outside nor inside, but only one being always in act; from a human point of view this attitude can be seen from various angles. Never forget that if you can dialogue with God it is because he wanted to dialogue with you. The threefold attitude of man therefore corresponds to a threefold face of God in the Bible: the God of dialogue is the Saint, the Friend and the Guest. (Jean Lafrance)