Fr. John Powell, S.J. has said we need to pray as a Listener. To do this we need to reflect on
Six Questions:
1. Can God put a new idea directly and immediately into your mind?
2. Can God give you a new perspective with which to view your life with its successes and its failures, your agonies and your ecstasies?
3. Can God put a new desire into your heart and a new strength into your will?
4. Can God touch and calm your troubled emotions?
5. Can God actually whisper words to the listening ears of your soul through your imagination?
6. Can God stimulate certain memories that you have stored in your brain when these memories are needed?
If you can answer Yes to even One of these questions, then you are ready to pray, to pray as a Listener. When we pray as a Listener, we grow spiritually. We get an insight, an awareness, and a growing consciousness of what God wants to happen in our lives.
That insight, that awareness, that conviction and that growing consciousness does not go away. It remains. We know it. We feel God’s presence, his love, and his will deep inside of us. That is what happens when we pray as a Listener.
“Speak Lord, your servant is listening,” 1 Sam 3:10.
