My Prayer to the Holy Trinity

 Dear God, I don’t want to pass the buck but your being within me hasn’t been discussed too often or too clearly. I hate to sound critical but this doctrine on the Indwelling has been passed over rather superficially in my early religious training. I never heard this from the nuns in grade school or the brothers in high school.

Yet Lord, all the while, deep down I wanted your love and the reassurance of your love as I always tried to earn it. So you can see why your Indwelling presence strikes me as strange and foreign.  Now I’m  told that although they are beautiful and comforting, reciting the prayers I was taught and had memorized is not the only way I can speak to you and that I should converse naturally, in a familiar and relaxed way as if you’re “one of the family” because You Eternal Three, have made your home within me.

And yet I hesitate. My religious training emphasized that you were the one who would punish me if I even talked in Church... and as a youngster I remember confessing it because it was a sin. I was trained to be meticulously respectful when I came into your presence, as if you were present to me only in Church. (I remember feeling guilty for a long time when Sister Janice discovered Ralph and me playing the theme from “Dragnet” on the organ in the choir loft, one Saturday afternoon. Who knew she was in the sacristy preparing the altar for Sunday Mass? I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to face her wrath on Monday or roast in hell forever?) Now, I’m being told that your presence is within me! And I’m supposed to be comfortable with you. Yet, I feel as though I should hold my breath.

Dear God, now I’m learning not to think of grace as the absence of sin but as a gift of your presence, Father, Son and Spirit within me.  And that you are closer to me than I am to myself and that you want to be...for no other reason except that you love me. This idea is so beautiful that I really want to hold on to this feeling forever.  I’m trying to understand that the more aware, conscious, alert, and attentive I am to your triune presence within me, the more I will find you in all things. Dear God, I really do want this. What a love you must have for me! A genuine, boundless, omnipotent, all-present, eternal, home  within me! I certainly need a mature faith for this. I no longer can go just gliding along the surface of my old religious practices anymore, can I?

Thank you Lord.

In the Name of the Father, from whom we came and to whom we are going, and to the Son, in whom we find our true self, and to the Holy Spirit, the divine aliveness in our innermost life. Amen               (John 16:12-15)

(adapted from  Ronald T. Haney SJ, God Within You, Mysticism for the 21^st Century, pp. 150-151)