We don’t pray to make God present to us. God is always present everywhere. We pray to make ourselves present to God. God, as Sheila Cassidy colourfully puts it, is no more present in Church than in a drinking bar, but we generally bar, but we generally are more present to God in Church than we are in a drinking bar. The problem of presence is not with God, but with us.

Sadly, this is also true for our presence to the richness of our own lives. Too often we are not present to the beauty, love, and grace that brim within the ordinary moments of our lives. Bounty is there, but we aren’t. Because of restlessness, tiredness, obsession, haste, whatever, too often we are not enough inside of ourselves to appreciate what the moments of our own lives hold. 

Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s search for Meaning was lucky. He was revived by doctors after being clinically dead for a few minutes. When returned to his ordinary life, everything suddenly became very rich: “One very important aspect of post-mortem life is that everything gets precious, gets very piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things – just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting. One gets the much-intensified sense of miracles.”

The secret to prayer is not to try to make God present, but to make ourselves present to God. The secret to finding beauty and love in life is the same. Like God, they are already present. The trick is to make ourselves present to them. 

Ron Rolheiser OMI