Wordless Prayer

Column: Always (October 5-11, 2008 issue of DCHerald) Wordless Prayer by Erwin Joey CABILAN

There were times that when we pray, we only said few words. There were times, too, that in our prayer words we could hardly think of words that we wanted to say. If there were words, we found ourselves stuck up to repeat those words over and over again. At first, I thought that I was in a dilemma. I asked myself why my vocabulary got so limited this time, a time when I felt the need to be listened to by God. Our heart speaks what our minds can hardly conceive. This can be linked to a reality in prayer most especially if we experience a wordless prayer. But is this reality a problem? Is this something that we have to worry about? Is this something that we have to struggle? Prayer does not observe a proper and correct grammar. If there is a norm that prayer follows, it is the norm of loving. Teresa of Jesus defines prayer that it is more of loving rather than of thinking. She never highlights only the affective dimension nor disregards the value of mental ascent when we pray. If we look at her definition, it says that prayer is an encounter with Person of God rather than of intellectual abstraction about God. As an encounter with the Living God, loving summarizes the proper disposition of the whole human person: the believer. This expression of love, which is a human capacity, is basically rooted in the God who has first loved us in many ways. How can a loving relationship be sustained in prayer if we run out of words about love when we talk with the God of love? I am never exempted from this so called wordless prayer. On that very moment that I prayed to Him and I was struggling to find words, I decided to keep myself silent and I started to listen. I simply looked at the lighted candle that made my dark room bright. I waited. I waited. I waited. But my silence, my waiting and listening were never in vain. Why? Because I am convinced that there’s God, the God who loves. I feel the need not to write more about this topic. God has many things to say to my mind and to write in my heart. Every word, even how simple it is, communicates the essence of what you and I can struggle in a wordless prayer. It neither sounds too imperative nor too declarative. It is more of a gentle persuasion that invites each one of us to be still and to know that God is God. Listening allows us to enter into a mystery in which God possesses us entirely. Let us listen to Him!