So, Just How Important Prayer Really Is?

"Evening and morning and at noon, I will complain and murmur, And He will hear my voice." Psalm 55:17.

"Now when Daniel knew that the document was signed, he entered his house (now in his roof chamber he had windows open toward Jerusalem); and he continued kneeling on his knees three times a day, praying and giving thanks before his God, as he had been doing previously." Daniel 6:10.

So I'm really busy lately.

I have a part time job as an interfaith organizer for a non-profit. I love my job, but on most days I leave the office mentally exhausted.

On top of that I'm also part of an ecumenical missionary order where we do ministry among the immigrant population in Oakland.

Add to that wedding planning and you have a recipe for near burnout.

Unfortunately, my predicament is hardly unusual. In a culture that values productivity and achievements, most of us are probably overworked.

And then you want me to pray? Who has time to pray in a schedule like this?

That worked for people like Jesus and His disciples. And those monks who have nothing to do but pray and get a tonsure.

So just how important prayer really is?

I've been slowly convicted of the importance of prayer, especially during seasons where I divulged into undisciplined prayer. After this period of neglect and dryness, I would usually restart my prayer life, only to fall back again into a sparse prayer life once again.

I believe my undisciplined prayer life came from a lack of conviction of the importance of prayer. But before we go there, why is prayer so important anyways?

Relationship. It's all about relationships.

Christianity, in a way, is a right relationship to God and to others. We are connected to God through our work  of peace and justice and righteousness towards others, but also through a basic way of connecting to others and the Great Other: communication.

Take out communication and a relationship is severely damaged.

This relationship between us and God is described as a covenant, the culmination of which is a wedding feast. Can a marriage survive without communication? Can friendship thrive without contact and communication?

Communication is therefore, the bedrock of relationships. 

So, I also love eating. I mean, honestly, who doesn't? It's not like we ago around hearing people complain about how "we always have to eat and stuff".

So I eat. Three times a day. Most of us do the same, busy or not. 

My point here is not to go around making you feel guilty about putting up excuses for not having enough time to pray, and yet how we still have time to eat. I struggle with the same, so I hope I'm not coming across like a fanatic who makes Westboro's Baptists cringe.

My point simply is this: if we consider prayer vital, we would have no other option than to make time for it.

Not there yet? No worries, neither am I. My only hope is to inspire us to get there!

So for 2015 I have been trying to get there. First, I am trying (emphasis on the word trying) to get up early to set aside time for morning prayer and study. I have been more or less successful in this. The benefits for this are so great that I have decided to add more times of prayer.

It has always been my desire to have scheduled time for prayers. I'd love to be able to stop and practice morning prayer, midday prayer, and evening prayer.

The three times a day prayer has been a staple not only from early Christianity, but for Jews, as evidenced by the passages at the beginning of this post from King David and Daniel. In fact, this is still a daily practice of many Jews nowadays.

I feel God is calling me to lead this prayer life, and to make it a point that such life is possible, in the midst of the crazy business of life with family and all. No need to isolate from the world and into monasteries. 

This sounds really like an impossibility, but I'm determined to prove that is not. 

I have been practicing praying three times a day, using the Liturgy of the Hours, for this past week. It hasn't been easy.

Sometimes I have to pray evening prayer on crowded buses, while there is a lot of noise that can distract me.

Sometimes I have to leave my food to cool off for a while before I finish my midday prayer.

I have been using different liturgies as well. Sometimes I do a Celtic morning prayer, then use the midday prayer from the Common Prayer book, and finish with Vespers using the Catholic Breviary.

It is difficult, but I love it.

And honestly, relationships are difficult. It is probably the most difficult thing we are called to do.

And honestly, relationship with God is the one that is easiest for me to set aside, because I know how patient and merciful He is, and He will not simply smite me because I failed to pray one day. I know He is there, the great Initiator, calling me, always glad to receive me without punishment.

I take advantage of His grace, mercy, and love.

As I write this, it breaks my heart to admit it. I have taken advantage of His grace, mercy and love, and failed to give Him the attention and time He desires from me. This loving Father yearns to be with me, and I ignore Him today because I know He will be there tomorrow.

How could I have ignored you for so long, Love of loves? How many days did You patiently wait for me to return and how little regard you had for Your Majesty as you ran to receive me?

It breaks my heart. You never shunned me for being away. You never said "How dare you ignore me?!" All You did was receive me as if I had never failed. All You did was console me and dried the tears that this hurting world left me.

Oh dear Lord, may we never fail to ignore You!

Do you struggle to find time for prayer? If you have a family with kids, how do you find the time to pray? What are the ways you have managed to find more time with God?

Why I Love Liturgy (And Why you Should Explore it Too)

I'll be honest, when I was a little kid I hated anything that smelled liturgical. The same automated responses, the dullness of just going through the motions, and the never ending prayers that repeat themselves ad infinitum (dear Rosary, I'm looking at you).

It is kind of funny that I "ended up" here, getting all excited about prayer and the Divine Hour and stuff. Not only that, but now that I have given myself permission to explore and learn from different Christian traditions I'm totally geeking out with different liturgies.

So what the heck is wrong with me? How did this magical transformation took place? How did a self-described enthusiast and charismatic fell so madly in love with liturgy?

It's not like after my conversion all the sudden I enjoyed all this stuff. It was a slow process, one that took almost a decade after my decision to follow Jesus.

At first I was all into the charismatic movement, all dancing and crying and clapping and lifting my hands up kinda stuff. The music was loud and overtly emotional. I loved it.

Slowly, however, after having too many overwhelming emotions at services, your body and spirit needs a break. Yeah, I love Jesus, but I don't need to cry about it every Sunday to show it.

And then I took theology classes in a local Catholic church. They required all students to pray morning prayer before classes started.

I bought the Liturgy of the Hours prayer book and started praying every morning.

Slowly, its beauty started to reveal itself to me. I felt a sense of peace. The slow and contemplative rhythm of ancient prayer life started to take its effect on me.

Like many good things in life, liturgy is an acquired taste, but once your spiritual taste buds get used to it you will find deep wells of contemplation.

I see Liturgy as poetry. The rhythms required of it, the perfect balance of praying the psalms, antiphons and intercessions is an art in itself.

Poetry, unlike some prose, it's not something you can swallow like a burrito in one sitting, but it is something appreciated and savoured slowly, like a carefully crafted, multi-course meal. You ponder over each words (or bite) and begin to appreciate the intricacies and beauty of it.

Liturgy is prayer made art. It is our collective praise poem to God, where we gather to make something beautiful in honor of God.

Liturgy also connects us with the wider body of Christ. This is hard to describe, but after a while you start to feel connected with all the people praying the same prayers you are, in different tongues and on different parts of the world.

Liturgy is hugely helpful when words fails us. There are times in life where prayer doesn't come easy. Words won't just come out. Sometimes we need to ride an ancient wave and rest in its old wisdom.

Liturgy also brings us together in worship, where its prescribed nature levels the field among participants, and all, the shy and the exuberant, get to pray equally.

So if you feel that there is something missing in your prayer life I invite you to try it out! Thanks to the Internet, this is easier than ever. You no longer need to go to a book store, get intimidatingly big prayer books with 10 ribbon markers, and cry after 2 hours of figuring out how to pray like monks.

There are different liturgies available online, for free, where you can get your monk on.

Everything is set up for you in a linear way, so you don't have to figure out where the psalms for today are in the psalter, the appropriate antiphons for ordinary time vs. lent and a bunch of other stuff that monks and clergy learn to maneuver out of sheer necessity.

For heaven's sake there are even apps for it!

So here are my favorite liturgies you can get online and for free. Some of these websites have apps you can download, but not all of the apps are for free! I just access them through my web browser on my phone if the app is not free.

Divine Office: http://divineoffice.org/

Here you can get all the prayers for the liturgy of the hours that is used in the Catholic Church. There is an audio version of it, where you can follow along with the text.

Mission St. Clare: http://www.missionstclare.com/english/

This is more from the Episcopal/Anglican tradition, and it uses the Book of Common Prayer. They have hymns already recorded, which is a huge plus! The prayers are a little bit longer though, so only pray if you have the time for it. If not, then I recommend you make time for it!

Common Prayer: http://commonprayer.net/

This is my current favorite. It mixes different Christian traditions, and it has a slight social justice twist to it!

Northumbria Community: http://www.northumbriacommunity.org/offices/how-to-use-daily-office/

If you are more into the Celtic tradition, then this one might work for you!

That's it for now. Do you have other liturgies not listed here that you enjoy? What is your favorite way of praying?

The Death of an Insidious Dream...

After my decision to follow Jesus in 2002 I knew God was calling me to do something important.

Call it the perennial idealism of my youth or a genuine calling from God, but I had a deep sense that God was calling me for great things.

As the years passed by however, this sense of calling slowly turned into a dream, and from a dream it evolved into an ambition, and then slowly into a sense of entitlement.

I am entitled to do great things for God I thought.

To add to this process of entitlement there were a couple of words of knowledge given to me from a couple of people: God is calling you to do great things for the youth.

Thing is, from my own perspective, I am still waiting for these great things to happen.

A conversation with my fiance prompted me to do some serious thinking about this dream.

"People won't probably write books about us, and that is fine" she told me.

But it wasn't fine with me. I felt disturbed when she said this. And then I knew something was wrong. Why would I not be OK with books not being written about me? How did this pretentious attitude about my life's calling got inside of me?

I felt grieved. I felt that by shining light into the arrogant entitlement of this dream it emphatically and irreversibly died. That's what light does to darkness after all.

In my prayer, I shared with Jesus this grief. Lord, how about all your promises?

Then I heard Him say, "take care of the little things, and let me take care of the great things".

I realize now that my focus, or my purpose, is not to do great things for God, but to take care faithfully and with great love the small things He has put me in charge and leave the rest to Him.

Mathew 20: 26-27 has a lot of things to say about greatness. The greatness spoken of here is so radically different to our westernized idea of greatness, that I wonder if these are two completely different ideas.

We see greatness when mighty and powerful people accomplish many good things for themselves and others. Books are written about these heroes, their praises sung in every corner. Usually, these are people with power and authority.

And then Jesus drops this big one on His disciples: "It shalt no be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant". Awesome.

The word translated from the Greek here as servant is Diakonos, where we get the word for Deacon.

A diakonos was a servant, an attendant, one who served food and was ordered by those in authority to do so. Hardly our idea of greatness.

As if that wasn't enough, Jesus drops off an atomic bomb in the next verse: "...and whoever would be first among you must be your slave". Seriously Jesus?

The Greek word translated as slave here is doulos, which can also be translated as bond servant, one who was so devoted to another that his or her own interest was disregarded.

Jesus moves from being a diakonos as a recipe to be great, to doulos if you want to be the greatest. That's nuts, if you think about it.

And then if you think about it a little longer, you may find it beautiful. The one with less privilege, the one marginalized and mistreated, the one who is disregarded as less than human, this is the one who are great in Jesus' eyes.

And if you want to be great in Jesus' eyes, you must be so utterly in love, so radically and completely lost in God's way, that you have not much time or desire to look at your own self-interest, and your own privileges, whatever they are, are offered to the needs of others.

What Jesus is asking of us is indeed frightening. What He seeks is intimidating and foreign to our own ambitions.

Jesus is not simply something you add on to your life in order to make everything better, or to simply "Christianize" areas of your life.

Following Jesus will inevitably mean dying to ourselves. It ultimately means nothing short of the cross.

I don't want to seek to be famous anymore. I don't want to make the point of my life to do great things.

I want to, instead, do small things with great love, for that's all that is asked of me.

Introducing A Simple Follower...

It has been a long journey...

Let's go back briefly to 2002. I was 17 years old, living in Managua, Nicaragua. Through the preaching of some fundamentalist Pentecostals I decided to follow Jesus.

It was one of the happiest moments in my life. I felt a new and bright future open up to me. I now had a reason to live beyond my own ambitions.

Thing is, the fundamentalist Pentecostals were so disgusted by Catholicism that I was in turn disgusted by their own rhetoric. It felt foreign to what the Spirit was telling me, be one as I and the Father are one.

I deepened into my Catholic faith, felt in love with the lives of the saints, and yearned to imitate their examples. At some point I even wanted to become a priest.


Shortly after this life changing experience, I moved to California. My desires to follow Jesus increased as time passed by. My desire to become a Roman Catholic priest however, decreased.

Another desire growing in me was one of unity, of ecumenical Christian unity. I joined an ecumenical missionary order and started to work along side protestants of different denominations.

What a beautiful experience it has been! I learn from their different traditions, and they, in turn, learn from mine.

Slowly, a shift started to take place in my mind. I went from believing that the Roman Catholic faith is the one true Christian faith, to seeing and experiencing something so obvious that it became undeniable: God is working mightily in the lives and work of some of my protestant brothers and sisters.

Simply said, they are as much part of the only flock of Christ as I was. They were simply followers of Christ.

I started to see how the long history of institutionalization of the church transformed the small group of first century radicals, living and sharing everything in common, to tribal institutions, where being part of their walls became more important than being part of Christ.

Whenever we find more important being part of an institution than being part of Christ, we know something has gone tragically wrong.

What am I now? Am I still Catholic? Am I protestant? The answer is yes!

At the same time the answer is no. I no longer believe all the tenets of the Catholic faith to be considered by the institutional church as a "true Catholic".

I still hold many Catholic beliefs, however. I believe in the Nicene Creed. I believe even in the invocation of Saints. I still pray to the Virgin Mary from time to time, and want to see my devotion to her grow. The Eucharist is still central to my Christian life. For goodness sake I still believe in purgatory!

At the same time I have grown in many traditions that are considered "protestants". I hold Holy Scriptures above tradition, without disregarding tradition as a whole. I believe in the Priesthood of All Believers as protestants do.

I believe in Open Communion, for all who want to commune with Jesus should be allowed to do so without making sure they check off a list of dogmas. I believe women should be ordained to the ministry.

So don't just call me a Catholic or a Protestant, or a weird combination of the two. If you wish to call me anything, call me A Simple Follower of Christ.

This is what I desire. This is my hope.

I want to learn and grow in both Protestant and Catholic Traditions. I want to experience fully the riches of our traditions, and submerge deeply in the streams of living water that they are!

So this a blog about the struggles that this calling will bring. A challenge to the institutions will always bring a struggle.  This is the struggle of belonging to all traditions and, at some level, be rejected by all traditions.

This blog is also about growth. How can I and we grow as followers of Christ? How can we learn and reach from the deep wells of our Christian heritage?

So come and be a simple follower with me!