"Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in Heaven"
Gospel of Matthew
Why did Jesus single out prayer, fasting and almsgiving to His disciples? In the Hebrew scriptures, these three were considered the cardinal works of the religious life. They were seen as the key signs of a pious person, three great pillars on which the good life was based. In fact, they are still considered so today, and have also been adopted in our Christian tradition. However, Jesus warns us that it is not enough just to do them. We must do them with the right intention. "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them, for then you have no reward from your Father in Heaven."
What does Jesus mean by this? Is God sitting up there in heaven evaluating everything we do, making sure we have the right intention in our hearts when we do it? If we do it right, we are awarded, but if we don't do it right, no reward is given? Of course not.
Our God is a God of relationship. God wants to enter into relationship with us, and us with God. God wants us to personally encounter His presence in our lives, to experience the joy of the presence in a relationship of love; but this cannot happen if we do things like our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving for selfish purposes -- that is, to be seen or to be esteemed by others. It's not that God is absent when we pray with the wrong intention. God is always there. It's just that our awareness of God's presence is clouded over by "self", that which seeks its own benefit, and not for glorifying God.
The prayer we do in Christian meditation is a discipline for the purpose of transcending "self" so as to enter into that relationship with the Father. Christian meditation is a prayer form that many are unfamiliar or have difficulty understanding. The reason for it is that it is prayer based on silence, stillness and simplicity - of really doing nothing. The only thing we do is repeat our one sacred word or mantra. We seek to personally do nothing, achieve nothing. We have no words, goals or expectations. And by seeking nothing, having no goals for ourselves, we discover that God is inwardly present with us, and there is a personal uniting of that presence with us. It is a difficult prayer practice because this inner stillness is so often disrupted by constant thoughts of our own agendas and plans. We worry about what has happened in the past, we are creating plans for the future, we get caught up in our personal fantasies. This prayer discipline is the work of letting go of all of this through silence and stillness, of setting these things, ("self"), aside for a few moments.
This is what Jesus means when He says: "When you pray, go into your private room". This private room is the room of your heart free from self-absorbing distractions. "When you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in that secret place, and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you." In other words, as we empty ourselves, as our self-absorbing thoughts subside, we discover God's presence residing within us. This is why meditation is often referred to as pure prayer or prayer of the heart.
In all of our prayer, no matter what form it may take, we pray in a way that leads to that discovery of God's presence. It is God's presence that transforms us so that we may acknowledge with Saint Paul that it is in Him that we live, and move and have our being.
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