Concentration in prayer.

Accurate concentration in prayer is in which we are with prayer and ourselves. Prayer is completely inwardly identified, prayer expresses our state and attitude, and the act of praying expresses and mirrors our life.
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A personal relationship with Jesus? Well, that’s not it when we say what he has given us, how he healed us, what he did for us, and how he saved us. That’s… Familiarity. An acquaintance like the people of the crowds had with Jesus. But still needs to be a discipleship relationship. The relationship is what Paul writes about, “If we are children, we are heirs also: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ; indeed, if we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified.” (Rom 8:17)
This is also the answer to the disturbing question behind Jesus’ statement, “When the householder gets up and closes the door, and you stay outside, you begin to knock at the door and call out: “Lord, open to us!” And he will say to you: “I don’t know where you’re from!” Then you start talking: “We have eaten and drunk with you, as You taught in our streets.” But he will tell you: “I do not know where you are from; go away from me, all you who practice iniquity” (Lk 13:25-27).
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The community of the Church is born out of that overwhelming ease that man experiences when, through faith, he has been freed and redeemed from this world because he has received a new citizenship, a new residence, a new home in heaven, in the Family of God. At that moment, all those worldly (and earthly) things which until then were so deadly vital that we had fought and quarreled and torn unity and brought strife for their sake and division mean nothing anymore. Suddenly they are entirely incidental, episodic. With a light and cheerful “So what?” we throw them on our backs, and suddenly, love
and sharing is natural, and the barriers between us are suddenly gone.
This feeling, this realization, this experience of this lightness and liberation, is critical. It is an analogy of its substitute, the sense of agony and breaking in Peck’s model of the creation of community. As a response to evangelization, as a fruit of believing and conversion, it must be truly and genuinely experienced by everyone. Then comes hope, a view of life in this world as training where we do not struggle with things, people, and situations, but we accept them and vice versa
we use them in faith in God’s providence, intelligently, creatively, and with a specific dose of positive excitement – it’s exciting.
Finally, love comes when we begin to appreciate what God is – holiness, perfection, sheer goodness, beauty, truthfulness, love, unity,… – and so we love God for God’s sake. We also love and enjoy ourselves constantly greater and greater resemblance to God, and we long to have more and more of it. Faith relaxes apathy, carelessness, and freedom from lust and fear. Hope grows openness to the new and unexpected, freedom from prejudice, expectation, patent reason and truth, and the desire to have things under control, but to unite and consummate all things in Christ and according to Christ. Love ultimately produces the will to grow in oneself to perfection and to divide in others to share and share what I am and live with others.
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At the beginning of the journey, fasting is a sacrifice and a denial for us when we are still in the world and not in the Kingdom. It is both an instrument of our purification and an expression of love for Christ. Later, when the world no longer speaks to us, the Kingdom is our home, and poverty and fasting are a gift and a relief to us; God must bring in another form of fasting and sacrifice so that our love may grow upon it to the perfection of selflessness – and that is that night of the soul, of the crisis, when God seems to hide from us. We must fast from the Lord Himself and His Light to learn to love even in the darkness, free, as God does.
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Christianity is simply love. Love of God. Marriage to God. That is the
Circumvent table, the fundamental thing at the very heart of it. Everything else is or starting point (our freedom, reason, and will) or the fruit of that love (apartheid, carelessness, relaxation,…) – but the essence and the very center is love, “an act of the will, a decision to give one’s whole life to the life of another” (cf. E. Fromm) – in this case, God. It means (as psychologist Robin Skynner would say) that the other we do not need. We can and can live without it. Even without God? Sure.
Look around at how many people live without God! Although from our point of view miserable and pretty much useless, they live. They can. Notable. God made us so that we can practically live without Him. We are truly free! God doesn’t need us, and we can live without Him. That is the basis for love!
Love means that God, though He doesn’t need us, freely shares with us what He is, what He has, and what He lives. He doesn’t have to. But He does – because He wants to. And he can do so precisely because all He is truly belongs to Him. Therefore, it can be in love to give it. He could not provide what did not belong to Him. In the same way, we can love God – by giving in equal measure, we choose to give to God, to share with Him our life, which is ours, it is ours, we can do with it as we wish – and that is why we can truly love it, to honestly give it to God in the form of service, sacrifice, communion with God. The result is a unity based on love that does not destroy freedom or enslave us but binds us to each other as free and independent persons – us and God. This is Heaven. And when we decide like this to give ourselves to God, Christianity, the life of the Bride and the Bridegroom, begins.
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