Spiritual Message of the Day from Fr Augustinos:
The Secret Room
In the gospel on Sunday of the preparation for Lent, the first spiritual practice we are instructed to do is in Mathew 6:6
“But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.”
This Lent, let it be a deep and intimate relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ. We want to experience His deep love and we want to enter into His glory. We want to enter into His mystery and for our Lord to reveal his secrets to us.
In Songs 1:4 the human soul is saying “The king has bought me into his chamber we will be glad and rejoice in you” …
And again our soul says in Songs 3:4
“When I found the one I love I held him and would not let him go, until I bought him to the house of my mother and into the chamber of her who conceived me..” this alludes to the intimate secrets that only the beloved will know about us and we will know about Him the beloved Lord Jesus.
How do we enjoy the deep intimate love of our Beloved this Lent?
We carefully observe the gospel’s command of preparation Sunday which says that we should go into our room and pray to our Father with the door shut.
We shall fulfil this in the following way. We pray in our room or special prayer room (Nest, Nido or cell), perhaps with icons and candles Then we withdraw our hearts completely from the clatter of every thought, every passion, every distraction, concerns and disclose our prayers to the Lord in secret, as it were intimately with Him.
We pray with the door shut with closed lips and in total silence. We pray to the searcher not of voices but of hearts. We pray in secret, drawing the heart and mind in alone. We offer our petitions to God alone, so that even the adversary powers cannot not discover the nature of our petition.
We must pray with the greatest silence and times without any thought, so we may hear the voice of the Lord in our hearts to comfort and give us consolation.
We pray in vigils to break our sleep to experience the presence of the Lord in complete silence. As David said in Ps 63:1 “O God, You are my God; Early I will see you my soul thirst for you”. As the world is asleep it will be only you and the Lord Jesus alone. The feeling of having Christ to yourself is like in Mathew 13:45-46, when the Lord Jesus said “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it”.
Let’s focus on the pearl of great price this Lent. Let’s sell all of our sins, distractions, attachments and passions to purify our hearts to buy the pearl of great price. Let’s enjoy the beauty of the Lord Jesus in a clear, unobstructed way, with a pure heart and rest assure God will reveal His many secrets and mysteries and show us His glory in our life.