Fr. Wayne Sattler: Is Our Prayer Being Heard?

We may sometimes wonder if our prayers are being heard by God.  The deeper question we are wise to ask first, is if we are truly aware of Who we are talking to when we pray.

St. Teresa of Avila would advise her sisters that “a prayer in which a person is not aware of whom he is speaking to, what he is asking, who it is who is asking and of whom, I do not call prayer however much the lips move” (Interior Castle 1.1.7).  She goes on to observe how “anyone in the habit of speaking before God’s majesty as though he were speaking to a slave, without being careful to see how he is speaking, but saying whatever comes to his head and whatever he has learned from saying at other times, in my opinion is not praying.”

When it comes to prayer, far too many souls, even good religious souls, can seem to be just moving their lips with memorized words. There are some who prove to be talking to themselves. In the 1972 dark comedy The Ruling Class, actor Peter O’Toole played the character Jack Gurney. Jack was a paranoid schizophrenic British nobleman who thought he was God. When asked how he knew he was God, the revealing answer came, “Simple. When I pray to him, I find I am talking to myself.”  Even among good religious souls with a firm belief in God, St. Teresa recognizes how they sometimes think they are hearing God speak to them, while in fact they are “gradually composing what they themselves want to be told” (Interior Castle 6.3.14). …

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