Christ the Cornerstone

Listen to God and open your heart to him

Prayer is conversation with God. You don’t need to understand how you talk to God. You just do it. He loves to listen to you and especially delights in your silence when you listen to him. (Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Soul of My Soul: Reflections from a Life of Prayer).

Most of us think of prayer as a monologue. We talk to God and tell him our needs and desires, our hopes and dreams.

Even the prayer that Jesus taught us, which we rightly call The Lord’s Prayer, is in the forms of praise (“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name”) and petition (“give us this day our daily bread”). We are speaking to God as our Father, and we are asking him to do for us things we cannot do for ourselves (“forgive us our trespasses” and “lead us not into temptation.”)

What we don’t often realize is that prayer is a dialogue, and that to be fruitful in our communication with God, we must listen as much or more than we speak.

When we pray “thy will be done,” we are committing ourselves to listening to God’s Word in order to discover his will for us. This demands that we pay attention to what God is saying to us. It means approaching prayer as a two-way conversation, a dialogue not a monologue.

In the Gospel reading for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Mt 13:1-23), the disciples ask Jesus why he teaches the crowds using parables. Here is his reply:

This is why I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand. Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in them, which says:

“You shall indeed hear but not understand, you shall indeed look but never see. Gross is the heart of this people, they will hardly hear with their ears, they have closed their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and be converted, and I heal them.” 

But blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear. Amen, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it. (Mt 13:13-17)

Hearing what God is saying requires listening with an open mind and a receptive heart. We cannot discern God’s will for us if we’re not listening to what he is saying. We cannot pray effectively if we do all the talking.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty was a spiritual writer whose life is often suggested as a model for those drawn to prayer and social ministry. She is frequently included among the lists of holy men and women to read

when considering lives centered on prayer, contemplation and service. She established the Friendship House in Harlem, New York City, in 1938, and later the Madonna House Apostolate in Combermere, Canada.

In Soul of My Soul: Reflections from a Life of Prayer, she writes:

Listen to [God]. What he has to say is vitally important for us. Hold onto him with all your might and let everything else fall away. Nothing is of much importance compared to God. When he becomes the center of our life, all else will settle into place.

Listening to God’s Word in Scripture, in prayer, in preaching, in our reception of the Holy Eucharist and the other sacraments, and in the heartfelt cries of the poor and vulnerable, makes us receptive to his will for us and for the world. Listening makes it possible for us to pray authentically: “Thy will be done” and it transforms our prayer from a self-centered monologue into an other-centered dialogue with the Lord who listens to us because he loves us.

God’s holy Word comes to us in many different forms throughout each day—if only we are listening.

As the first reading for this Sunday tells us in beautiful imagery:

Thus says the Lord: Just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down and do not return there till they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, giving seed to the one who sows and bread to the one who eats, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; my word shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it. (Is 55:10–11)

God’s Word accomplishes its objective when it is planted in fertile soil and is allowed to take root and grow. When our hearts are open and we listen attentively, God’s Word takes root in us. †