To love God in all things, and all things in HIM.

(St. Ignatius of Loyola)

To tell you about my experience of prayer, I want to start with some of the expressions I hear people say: “I go to the chapel to pray and meet with God”. People also say: “I go to the Blessed Sacrament to be with God”. Others say, “I can’t pray because I don’t have a church nearby.” Some may even express “that they are far from God”.

Of course the chapel is an ideal place for prayer, and in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament we are before Jesus himself, but it is important not to forget the experiences that the saints have transmitted to us regarding their search for God and ways of finding him.

St. Ignatius of Loyola says in the “Contemplation to Attain Love” of the Spiritual Exercises: “God dwells in creatures …; likewise he dwells in me by making me a temple, for I have been created in the likeness and image of his divine majesty” (EE 235).

If we take seriously these words of St. Ignatius and what St. Paul already affirmed in his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 3:17, 6:19 and 2 Cor 6:16) that we are a temple of the Holy Spirit, we can conclude with certainty that each one of us is a temple of God and our interior is a “sanctuary” where God himself dwells, “making me his temple”. 

How can we help those people who say they cannot pray because they do not have a chapel nearby, or that they do not have time to pray because they are too busy? By reminding them that God dwells within them, and that, therefore, the spiritual exercise of being in touch with our inner self, with ourselves, recognizing what is going on inside us, what is moving inside me in everything I live, by means of spiritual rereading, is the first step to “becoming” praying men and women. Men and women of prayer who, by being in tune with their inner self, are in tune with God himself. 

Year of Prayer

Carlos Canillas SJ

Jesuits of Paraguay