Prayer with the Heart
The late Fr Slavko Barbaric OFM explains:
Two things Mary has already told us about prayer – to make a space for prayer and to make prayer personal – are also conditions for praying with the heart. No one can pray with the heart if he has not yet decided for prayer, and this is then really the beginning of prayer with the heart.
How often is one asked here in Medjugorje what this means, and then also how to do it? How should one pray so that one prays with the heart?
Every one can start immediately to pray with the heart because praying with the heart means to pray with love, but praying with love does not mean that one can pray well or that one has memorised many prayers. Rather it means that one has begun to pray just when Mary has called one to pray, the way we all did in the beginning of the apparitions.
So, when someone says, “I do not know how to pray, but because you are calling me to prayer, I will start the way I can”, prayer with the heart has at that moment already begun. Were someone to decide to pray only when they can really pray with the heart, then they would never pray.
Prayer is a language, and therefore think what would happen if someone said that they would never speak a language unless they could speak it perfectly. In that case one would never be able to speak that language, because everyone who speaks a foreign language starts by saying very simple little things, practices, repeats again, and makes mistakes, and in doing so he grows and finally has learned the language.
One must be courageous to start in any way that one can and through daily prayer then we will also grow in praying with the heart.
