Why Do I Pray?

May 25, 1979
Sogang University
Seoul, S. Korea

"For you, Lord, I am writing this journal for you and you can pass it on if you like. I feel the need to incarnate, in actions and words, the dim intentions, intuitions and feelings of my soul. It's like an imperative of nature that I must express (ex prime), press out, into this world what I'm given to perceive of you at the heart of all my experiences.

"This expression, this incarnation, may be of utility to someone else. In any case, it clarifies the particular way you are giving yourself to me in my personality and history and circumstances. These are so much the locus and medium of your self-communication to me that to reject, bypass or undervalue myself is to treat you thus.

"I also see that this expression, as stammering and humiliatingly inadequate utterance as it is of You-in-me, is a purely liberal act of love and praise. It is being overflowing--ex abundantia cordis loquitor.

"The bird sings because it is a bird. Why do I pray?
For others in the Body and my own deeper adhesion to you and reception of your graces, yes. Obedience, yes. But, above and beyond all this, I must pray because of my being me and You being You. The creature must praise and long for his Creator because  that's part of the definition of creaturehood--a dependent, derivative existence.

"As lungs long for air, as eyes for sunsets and ears for music...so the relationship of the creature who longs for the Creator and the Creator who longs for the creature and the beloved who longs for the beloved can only really explain why I pray.

"And then there is playing in praying. Non-pragmatic, actively involved and the hardest to define aspect of prayer. This is the dimension that will survive death and constitute Eternal Life. Well, I suspect this journal too belongs to the category of "play", just ad prayer does. When pragmatic values don't move me, then may I praise you, Lord, by rehearsing and processing in these pages the stuff of your love poured out within me."