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 Enjoy your questions and discussions! 

Hi Everyone and welcome to Lumen Christi’s Teen Chat.  I’m sorry about the slow start for this website.  It’s taken a bit on our part to get this up and running.  The questions posted so far seem revolve around a couple of topics: prayer and relationships, so I’d like to take a stab to both of these in order to get the conversation started: 

 

On Prayer:    One of the questions was: “How do you know when you are praying?”  We often mistakenly think that prayer is about trying to contact an absent God, but in reality, prayer is about allowing the God who is always present to enter our minds and hearts.  In other words, prayer is first of all an encounter with God before it is a conversation with God.  Since God is everywhere, the feeling can grow in us that he is nowhere.  That means that the first part of prayer is to still yourself long enough to hear God’s voice.  This is hard for most of us when there is so much “noise” out there.  But I’ve found that if you take five or ten minutes at a specific time each day to still yourself, to just sit in God’s presence – no thoughts, no questions, no conversation – you will actually miss that time of prayer when you don’t. 

 

     A second part of prayer is what I would call reflection.  If you are in God’s presence, what is that saying about you, your day, your world?  Too often we don’t stop the living of life long enough to understand what it is doing to us.  We fall into patterns or habits of living unreflectively.  We hold onto a grudge, for example, and don’t notice that we have become meaner, more intolerant, more cynical.  We also don’t notice how it is distancing us from that person and all they have to offer us because we have turned them into their little slight.  Prayer doesn’t help you to escape the ups and downs of life.  Prayer helps you to consciously participate in them instead of just floating through days and weeks and years of your life without ever noticing how life is changing you.  Prayer of reflection sharpens your vision of yourself so that you can realize you don’t need to live the way you do. 

 

     A final dimension of prayer is what one person on the Chat called contacting friends over social media and at school: prayer of connection.  This notion of prayer suggests that praying is not just a purely individual project.  As Jesus says, “How can you love the God you can’t see, when you can’t even love those you can?”  We live in unbreakable connection with others but often we can forget that.  At this time of social isolation, we can perhaps see more clearly how we truly need each other – especially those we normally take for granted.  When we pray for both friend and stranger alike, we re-establish that connection.  Prayer brings to heart and mind the identity we cannot escape: that we are all in this adventure together.                                                                                                            

On Relationship:     One question wondered whether there are priests who had families and children.  Yes, this is true.  In many other traditions (including some Catholic ones) priests are allowed to be married.  In much of the history of our own church, priests were married.  Slowly over history and time the Roman church decided that priests should not be married because it was felt that giving oneself solely to a relationship with God allowed the priest to more freely serve the needs of the community.  Still, many other churches do both very nicely.  The promise that priests make to not be married today is actually the same promise as married partners make to one another.  It is by our commitments that we humans learn to grow in love. 

 

      But the point is that both the married and non-married life needs to be a relationship.  Genesis tells us that it is not good for us to be alone.  The purpose of life is to grow out of our native selfishness to be generous enough to live for others – and we all grow by fits and starts. 

 

      This leads to a couple of other questions not posted because they were more personal in nature and a bit specific.  They were around the question of sexuality.  Again, our sexual nature is made for relationship.  It is not good for us to be selfish in the use of our sexuality and the reason is simple:  Sex is spiritual dynamite.  People can be emotionally or psychically scarred for the rest of their lives over a misuse of sex.  People can be physically hurt (as in the case of rape) or even murdered over sex.  We see examples of these on the news and in the movies every day. 

 

       We need to be careful about what habits we are forming when it comes to sex.  If we are using our sexuality selfishly, why would we ever think that we would suddenly become selfless when we “fall” in love with someone else? I know of many teens who have been sexually “used.” Ask yourself what amounts to the Golden Rule: Would I liked to be used?  What you do to the other, you do to yourself; how you love yourself is how you love your neighbor; how you love God is how you love yourself; how you love yourself is how you love God.  How you do anything is how you do everything.  It’s all about relationship. 

 

     Well that’s it for this week.  Hope this is a bit helpful and can get some conversation started with your friends.  Keep the questions coming and we will try to see if we can make this Chat space even better.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Thanks, Father Paul