It is hard to pray to the present day ... It was certainly easier when you thought of prayer as a natural and daily activity: an indisputable way, accepted by all, to address God and trust in his hands, both in the normal rhythms of daily life and in the difficulties of life.
Now instead our materialistic culture hesitates in talking to a God that cannot be seen, that does not answer with words you can hear ... Prayer appears more and more as a form of popular superstition, or as a refuge for those who are older or sick and afraid of death ...
Stuff for naive people or children: a way of consolation, a means to fall asleep compared to the hardships of life ... to take refuge in a world that does not exist.
But is it really like this?
The mind, taken from the prevailing way of thinking of our time, pushes us not to waste time in prayers, and to focus instead on what we can do in life with our "human" means. However, when these means are not sufficient to "move forward", to understand the meaning of what happens to us, our reason does not help us anymore and often leaves us prey to incomprehensible pain, depression, lack of hope, slaves of a dark despair ...
The heart instead - if we find the courage to listen to him - pushes us in another direction: the heart knows that turning to "Heaven" in difficult times is not a waste of time, it is not a vacuous daydream.
This is why so many people are praying anyway, even if by doing so they have to hush up their mind. When we listen at this impulse, we make use of an inner wisdom, optimistic and positive, which is far greater than that of the mind ...
Moreover, everyone can see that our world is ruled by reason, by the laws of the market, by money, by science and rationalist thought is ruining most of Humanity and the Earth itself.
And, if we think, we are all able to understand that even in the life of each of us, if we follow only the rational search for material goods, we encounter pain and failure.
Is it maybe the absence of the heart in our culture that does not lead this world to take the right decision?
When you put your heart in thought, when you put a sincere desire for good - good for everyone - in what we think and then we do, this is called Consciousness.
Maybe then, these days, the right way to get in touch with the spiritual world is a "conscious" prayer. Which does mean to pray for the good of all, and not only for ourselves ... to pray "feeling" that we are part of a specific project, in which nothing happens by chance, and in which maybe it’s us that still do not have understood what is going on.
To pray does not mean asking for a result that comes from the outside, but for a "light" that lets us know how to do good in the difficult situations of life ... And maybe this "light", if we really ask for it with all our heart ... finally arrives!
Wasn’t there Someone ... two thousand years ago, that said " Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for “?
But be careful: you have to ask the right thing!
Fausto Carotenuto
President of Coscienze in rete
