The Encounter in prayer

Intercessory prayer, as well as that of praise, is populated with persons: we pray for the sick, the missionaries... In adoration, the whole world disappears, and we are left alone: He and I. And if we do not get to the point of being alone, just He and I, then there is no true encounter. I could be at a prayer meeting, amid five thousand people, where everyone is praying and talking. If I, in my own place and time, do not remain alone with my God, as if no one else breathed in the world, there is no real encounter with the Lord.

We began by saying that every encounter is intimacy, and all intimacy is a closed room. Every-thing that is vitally important is solitary. The biggest decisions are made alone; we die alone; we suffer alone; the weight of responsibility is the weight of solitude. The encounter with the Lord happens alone, even in communal prayer.

The encounter, then, is the meeting of two “solitudes.”

This is the great problem for achieving the encounter of adoration: I arrive, through silence, at my own solitude and the “solitude” of God. And, achieving this I quiet (isolate, untie myself from) the outside clamor, nervousness, tension, as well as internal turbulence, so that I perceive, in complete silence, my own mystery. And second, to be able to overcome the forest of images, ideas, and conceptions of God and remain with God Himself, with the Mystery, in the total purity of faith.

Extracted from the book “Sensing your Hidden Presence” by Father Ignacio Larrañaga