Dom Hubert Van Zeller - Prayer and the Will of God

Prayer and the Will of God

Hubert van Zeller

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Prayer and the Will of God was formerly published in 1978 by Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois, as a combined edition of Prayer in Other Words (Templegate, 1963) and The Will of God in Other Words (Templegate, 1964). This 2009 edition by Sophia Institute Press includes minor editorial revisions.

Copyright 2009 Sophia Institute Press

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Van Zeller, Hubert, 1905-1984.
[Prayer in other words]
Prayer and the will of God / Hubert van Zeller.
p. cm.Originally published: Springfield, Ill. : Templegate Publishers, 1978. With minor editorial revisions.ISBN 978-1-933184-59-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Prayer Catholic Church. 2. Christian life Catholic authors. 3. God (Christianity) Will. I. Van Zeller, Hubert, 1905-1984. Will of God in other words.
II. Title. III. Title: Will of God in other words.BV210.3.V36 2009
248.32 dc22200902610209 10 11 12 13 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Other books by Hubert van Zeller from Sophia Institute Press:

Holiness for Housewives

How to Find God

For Susan, Stephen, John, Paul, Mary:
the Andersons in other words
and
To Mary Vander Vennet in the hope that she may come upon it one day

Editors note: The biblical quotations in the following pages are taken from the Douay-Rheims edition of the Old and New Testaments. Where applicable, quotations have been cross-referenced with the differing names and enumeration in the Revised Standard Version, using the following symbol: (RSV =).

Part 1

Prayer

Chapter 1

Why We Must Pray

Why do people not pray enough? The answer is partly because they do not want to make the effort to begin, and partly because they do not know how to go on once they have begun. A lot of this difficulty would be cleared up if people would only understand that prayer comes from God, is kept going by God, and finds its way back to God by its own power. All we have to do is to lend ourselves to the process as generously as we can, and not put any obstacles in the way.

Our Lord is the light of the world, and by His light we are shown how to start and how to go on. The best way to think of it is to look upon our Lords prayer as an all-powerful dynamo that sends out spiritual strength day and night, unceasingly. From this dynamo our souls are charged, and when the batteries have gotten run down, we come again and again, every time we pray, to be recharged.

Without prayer we are in darkness, but in Gods light we see light.

Our Lord has said that we have not chosen Him but that He has chosen us. It is the same in this matter of prayer. We are not so holy or so clever that we can make prayer. Prayer is a grace. Prayer is so spiritual that it has to be made by God. God brings our prayer out of us by pouring His prayer in. We are just the bellows: His is the breath of life. When our Lord speaks of the Spirit breathing and the Light shining, He is speaking of His life in us.

If we share our Lords life, we must also share His prayer. This is the wonderful thing about being a member of His Church that we are part of His Body and part of the service He offers to the Father. He draws our service out of us by establishing Himself in our souls. We have the infinite merits of His life, death, and Resurrection to call upon at every moment of our lives. We cannot please God more than by calling upon them in the particular service of prayer.

Or you could put it this way. If you love someone very much, what is it that pleases you most about that person? You will surely answer, Being loved back. It is knowing that the other person feels as you do; it is seeing in another the same thing that is terribly important to you. Now, God is love. What He wants to see in you is the love He has put there. And He wants to see it expressed He wants it to show. And that is why He wants you to pray.

Perhaps you think of prayer as wanting something from God when you pray. Up to a point, this is right: you want mercy, strength to resist temptation, answers to particular petitions, graces of one sort or another. But it would be more true to say that God wants something out of you when you pray. What He wants out of you is a generous response to the prayer of His own, which, as we have already seen, He has put there.

He who has created all things, who owns heaven and earth, wants something that you alone among all the millions of human beings who have been born into this world can give. He wants your own, particular, personal, direct, here-and-now service. Nobody else can give it instead of you: it is yours alone to be given to Him alone. Your service of prayer is seen by God as a single thing by itself. You can either give it or refuse it.

By giving it, you give the best that is in you because it is His own love that you are returning to Him and by refusing it, you waste the greatest chance that God can offer you. When you pray, you are using your human powers to their highest possible limit in fact, you are using them beyond their highest possible limit because in prayer they are being carried along by grace and when you have decided to give up prayer, you have thrown away the one really solid support that you can depend upon in this life.

God gets a truly spiritual prayer from the angels and saints in heaven. He gets a mixed sort of prayer from you and me. Our prayer is spiritual (or it would not be prayer at all), but it is also bound up with these fallen natures of ours, which we cannot escape. For as long as we live on this earth, we shall have to be content with a weighted prayer, a prayer that we can never quite handle as we would like, a gritty and earthy prayer that has to be constantly lifted up and sent on its way more directly toward God.

But however weighted down our prayer may be, it is at least a prayer. It is an effort, and has made a start. If we can honestly say we are trying, we can just as honestly say we are praying. So long as I am really trying to please God in my prayer (or in anything else, for that matter), I am pleasing Him. All He asks is that I should try to serve Him. The moment I try, I am in fact succeeding. I do not have to feel that I am doing it well, and that my prayer is pleasing God, because feelings are likely to be quite wrong about the goodness or badness of our prayers. All I have to be clear about is that I am making the effort.

Chapter 2

How We Should Pray

After reading what has been said so far, you may feel like someone who has been told how necessary swimming is and then has been thrown into the water without being told how to keep afloat. To know how important prayer is and religiously, you cannot keep afloat without it will not be much good to you unless you go on to the next step, which is to learn how to go about it.

Having taken in what is called the principle of prayer, we now have to think about the performance.

Now, whether the performance is an outward one, bringing you together with other people to pray in a church, or whether you are praying on your own, the worship you give must be yours. It is person-to-Person. Even a ceremony in which everyone takes part (such as the Mass) is, underneath the printed words, a private conversation between you and God. What is called liturgical prayer is Gods revelation of Himself made public a revelation that invites a personal as well as a public return from those who are joining in. As if nobody else were there, God is revealing something of Himself especially to you.

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