"Lord, let my baby's fever go down; I've tried everything I know with her."
"Father in Heaven, help my son choose the right spouse. I tried talking to him about this new girl friend, but he won't listen."
"Jesus, watch over my mother during this surgery; I'm so tired I can't say another prayer."
"God, give me strength to do my job well at work today!"
Women, often enough, pray with their practical, no-nonsense, bone-weary lives. They trust that everything they do out of love and with love is a prayer. As Fr. Jean-Pierre Caussade, S.J., suggests, they "embrace the present moment as an ever-flowing source of holiness." Whether it's a chance to sit and read from their Bibles or say a rosary or a chaplet of Divine Mercy, or just to be silent and rest with God, their "formal" prayer times often come "on the fly," and are woven into a larger fabric of sometimes 24/7 service to their families, neighbors, work clients, church.
Yet the greatest saints are the most practical of people. They understand well that service is prayer, service is holiness. St. Teresa of Avila, they say, was as comfortable praying to God with a broom in her hand as with a crucifix. She said:
"Sometimes I observe people so diligently trying to orchestrate whatever state of prayer they're in that they become peevish about it....It makes me realize how little they understand about the path to union (with God.) They think the whole thing is about (spiritual) rapture.
"But no, friends, no! What the Beloved wants from us is action.
"What He wants is that if one of your friends is sick, you take care of her. Don't worry about interrupting your devotional practice. Have compassion. If she is in pain, you feel it too....This is not a matter of indulging an individual; you do it because you know it is your Beloved's desire. This is true union with His will.
"What He wants is for you to be much happier hearing someone else praised than you would be to receive a compliment yourself. If you have humility, this is easy." (Teresa of Avila, from "The Interior Castle.")
And yet, we women's strength can also be our weakness. Our strength is not having formal prayer times and spending our lives in service. And our weakness is not having formal prayer times and spending our lives in service. Because we NEED to spend time, waste time with God. We need to love ourselves - our souls - enough - to make time for God and God alone. Our Beloved lives within our souls and longs for us to speak with Him, longs for us to acknowledge Him, yearns for us to be one with Him.
Again, Teresa says -
"If I had understood as I do now that in this little palace of my soul dwelt so great a King, I would not have left Him alone so often.... But what a marvelous thing, that He who would fill a thousand worlds and many more with His grandeur would enclose Himself in something so small!" (Teresa of Avila, "The Book of Her Foundations.")
We can make our prayer and service one great uplifting of ourselves to God. While we work, our minds can turn again and again to God, slipping inside to the center of our souls, speaking to Him in praise, thanksgiving, intercession, or the silence of quiet rest, - and then our lives are wholly given to Him. The greater our love for Him, the more our souls stay on fire with love and the deeper and more tender our love is for everyone in our lives.
Throughout the world, we are simply women who pray, with our service and with our quiet times spent with our Beloved God. The power of our sacrificial, loving service holds families and nations together; the power of our intercessory prayer saves soul after soul which would otherwise live and die isolated from God. Together we light and ignite the world with love.