Last time I spoke to you I talked about the first element of living in the Spirit and that was the question of charity. Today I would like to go on to the second point which is prayer.

Prayer after all is the key question in our lives because prayer is the way we express our relationship to God, to Jesus or to both. So it is itself the place where you can see how you relate to God.

The Lord was complaining to Sr. Josepha Menendez that a lot of religious, in receiving the Eucharist, don= t know what to do when they receive him and they don= t talk to him. They don= t share their life like friend to friend, nor do they ask him any advice, nor do they recommend any people to them, etc. So he pointed out that this is a very important dimension of the relationship.

But the fact is that prayer is a dynamic that keeps the relationship deepening and so the next thing that really begins to happen, without a doubt, is we begin to listen to the Spirit better. We really hear the word of God when we= re faithful in prayer.

An example of this, Mother Teresa was given a house with brand new carpeting all over the place. She prayed and then she had it ripped out and thrown out. So she wasn’t just using human judgment about the situation. She wanted to know what God wanted her sisters to be doing in this place. So fidelity in prayer sharpens and deepens the capacity to be sensitive to what God wants in my life. That can be very deep and very sensitive in the sense that it can be everywhere, all the time, and every place. That means that I have to be pretty faithful to my prayer life.

Certainly one of the obstacles that has to be overcome in our prayer life is the difference between our charitable self -giving and our work and prayer.

Too often prayer gets the short end of the stick. Which means our prayer life is not vibrant enough to meet the Lord enough to want to be with him. We don= t know what to do when we= re with him.

So one of the characteristics of fidelity to prayer life is that you begin to desire and you take out time to be with the Lord. Now you= re happy to be there but you= re beginning to love him and desire him and desire to know him and also to have him known and loved by others. So a desire begins to awaken and that is really the root of all prayer, it= s the tremendous desire for God that makes for powerful prayer.

Then there= s the further step that the Lord lifts from our heart and from our minds heaviness. We begin to sense that we indeed are the children of God and we have a certain peace and contentment. We know that we are God= s children. Paul tells us that when we really live our Christian life we can say A Abba, Father!@ It comes from our heart, we= re happy and so our heart begins to lighten up as well as our mind and there= s no heaviness in us.

So right now the Lord holds each one of us in his heart. The real question is do we hold Jesus in our hearts?