Columns/Opinions

DEAR FATHER | Personal prayer is a dialogue with God

I have a good understanding of the sacraments, but I still struggle with personal prayer. Do you have any advice?

Father Dan Kavanagh

God calls each of us into a relationship with Him. So the question is, how do we grow deeper in that relationship?

Prayer!

We are blessed with a tradition of many beautiful prayers in our Church — written prayers that we memorized growing up, litanies, devotions, hymns and others.

There’s a lot more to prayer than we might first realize. Our personal prayer is a dialogue with God. We seek to grow a relationship, and we do that with other people by getting to know them and sharing about ourselves as well. The same is true with our relationship with God. Yes, God created us, but He still desires for us to share with Him from our hearts and share more about Himself with us.

There are many ways to approach this, but I’ve found the acronym ACTS helpful, especially when I desire to grow more comfortable in personal prayer with God.

Adoration

We spend time resting in God’s presence and adoring Him in prayer. We usually think of adoring God at church, maybe eucharistic adoration, which is ideal and a great experience. But adoration can also take place in our own personal prayer.

Contrition/confession

We seek God’s forgiveness for our sins. We express our sorrow for the times we have chosen to turn away from God and instead put some earthly thing in His place in our hearts. This doesn’t take the place of going to the sacrament of reconciliation, but it can be a great help in organizing our thoughts and what we later need to bring to the Lord in the confessional. We also come to a greater appreciation of God’s infinite mercy and unconditional love for us.

Thanksgiving

Expressing gratitude to God for the blessings in our lives is important in our mission to grow deeper in humility and to remember our reliance upon God’s graciousness.

Supplication

We humbly request of God for our heart’s needs and desires. When I was younger, there was never a time when I asked my parents for something that they weren’t already aware of, but my taking the step to ask them helped me to understand their love for me more deeply and helped me to grow and be more aware of what I truly needed. The same is true with our relationship with God. It might feel illogical to ask an all-knowing God for something, but He delights in our petitions in an infinitely deeper way than even a parent desires to provide for their children’s needs. As with parents, sometimes the response to the request might differ from what the petitioner anticipated. We pray “thy will be done,” entrusting that God knows best how and when to answer our requests and that God’s loving response may be in a way we weren’t anticipating.

Some days, you may spend more time in one of these parts than the others, and that will always depend upon what’s going on in your life. I hope that this acronym can be a helpful starting point for you. Eventually, you may find that you move back and forth between the parts without much thought or effort. It’ll just feel natural, the same as a conversation with someone that you’re close to!

Father Dan Kavanagh is director of the Catholic Deaf Ministry in the Archdiocese of St. Louis.

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