“Go to the chapel every day, even if only to say ‘who are you, and who am I?’” During my freshman year of college, I was struggling to find motivation to live my faith. Despite going to a deeply Catholic college and being surrounded by shining examples of holy men and women, the unprecedented autonomy I had over my time was intoxicating. It was these words, spoken to me by my mentor Dan, which put into perspective the beauty and importance of prayer.
These two questions: “Who are you” and “who am I” form the foundation of authentic prayer. They are, in a sense, the only important questions, and each and every prayer speaks them in one way or another. Identity is at the heart of communion, and knowledge of oneself and of God is at the heart of that divine communion which we call prayer. It is this that we seek when we come to prayer – a relationship, a communion. Over and above the proximate ‘reasons’ for our prayer, we come not to a divine answering service or to a help-desk, but to enter into and deepen our knowledge of – and consequently love for – God.
This communion demands interruption from the activities and time of the day. Prayer involves a transcending the ordinary, a break with routine. It is a way of sanctifying time and setting it apart for holy use. Like in any relationship, this ought not be a haphazard gift of time to the Lord, but should occupy a regular space in our lives. Pope Leo XIV spoke highly of this recently, when he said “Time dedicated to prayer, meditation and reflection cannot be lacking in the Christian’s day and week.”1
When we have set aside time for God, we find ourselves in a conversation. Prayer, after all, places us in communication with the divine. As with human conversation, this involves a reciprocity of listening. God, whose ear is always open to us, also desires to speak to us. He desires to communicate to us His will, to communicate His love, and most fundamentally, to communicate our identity as sons and daughters made in His image and likeness.
That question: “Who are you, and who am I?” pervades every experience of prayer. The Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et Spes teaches us that “only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.”2 When we come to prayer, we come ‘face to face’ with the Incarnation, the real person of Christ who really became man and dwelt among us. In prayer we seek to know Christ, who became man and lived among us. In knowing Christ, we come to know ourselves in relation to the gift of Christ. And, as knowledge is the precursor to love, it is prayer which enables us to love God and love ourselves as He loves us, in our complete dignity.
Consider the beginning of Christian prayer: the sign of the cross. This act, so habitual to many, is pregnant with meaning. We profess in that simple gesture a faith in the Trinity, a belief in the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus, a confidence that the path of salvation has opened for each of us, and sure conviction that we ourselves bear the image of God in our human flesh. How profound a prayer, in which we learn so clearly the great mystery of God’s trinitarian love for man! Consider also the great prayer of the Christian faith, the prayer which Christ himself taught us: the Our Father. In this prayer, we begin with the affirmation that God is not my Father alone, not our Father as humans alone but, since the words came from the lips of Christ, the word “our” is a commentary on our relationship with Christ to the Father: we are made sons and daughters as Christ is the Son of God. This tremendous mystery of God’s love for us communicates the essential truth of each human person: that we are each made in the image of God, redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice, and restored in Christ into divine childhood with God as our Father.
I said above that prayer is a sanctification of time, a consecration for holy use. St. Paul, however, calls us to “pray constantly” (1 Thes 5:17). This seeming paradox of praying always while at the same time needing to do many other things for our vocation as students is at first glance perplexing. Few of us, I imagine, are monks who have dedicated every waking moment to prayer. Is St. Paul exaggerating? Is he wrong?
At every moment, no matter what we do, God’s ear stands open to our words. He waits for us. We are indeed called to pray always, though this does not mean every moment must be spent in the chapel. To pray always is to cultivate the awareness of our relationship to God, our dignity as beloved children of so great a Father, and to begin to sanctify our minutes and hours by living and walking with God. While we study, practice sports, eat, sleep, while we spend time with friends and family, we are called to do so knowing that we are made in the image and likeness of God. We can cultivate the awareness in our minds that at every moment, we are held in the Heart of the Father, loved infinitely from an infinite heart. It is indispensable that we set aside dedicated time to speak from our souls to God in prayer, but we must never come to believe that our prayer must end simply because we return to our routines and our regular activities.
That advice from my friend Dan to go and ask God who He is and who I am has resonated constantly in my life. It is sound advice. We have a God who cares for us, who sees us as beloved children, who looks on us with a kindly countenance. We do not have a distant divine power, but a brother in Christ who leads us to the Father. This great mystery and gift should compel us to set aside some time each day and week to ask these precious questions. What a glorious truth, that God desires to speak with us, to speak to us, and invites us to do the same. With Christ let us go to the Father, seeking the answer to the questions, “Who are you, O God, and who am I?”
