book, when I realize that the living, life-giving Christ is offering me something wonderfully new, is offering to make me new.

If such a moment comes, do not be afraid. Do not think of the future. That will follow later. The terribly important thing now is to give a personal answer to Christ, to welcome Him, to throw yourself at His feet, to put all your trust in Him.

Where He will lead you, you do not know. That does not matter. Now simply give yourself to Him. This is the answer of gratitude. This is the answer of your love for Him.

A new life will be yours. He will unfold it before you gradually. But already you can show your love and gratitude in two ways. You can show your answer clearly (1) in your prayer and (2) in your behaviour.

1.WHAT IS PRAYER?

Sometimes we imagine prayer is something very complicated. This is not correct, for although prayer can be difficult, it is something quite simple. It is really friendship.

Saint Teresa said, “Mental prayer is nothing else than an intimate friendship, a frequent heart-to-heart conversation with Him by whom we know ourselves to be loved.”

Yoga, Japa, Dhyanan can all help us in prayer, but they are not the most important thing, which is the surrender of my self to God. They are like the ladder which carries me up, but which is only the means to climb and not the final goal.

The basic attitude of prayer is really a simple but heart-felt pranam to God, which a young student from Rajkot describes as “a Sanskrit word which means, `with folded hands I submit my whole self to your good self for your blessings.”

We have seen that conversion means turning my whole self towards God. It means taking my selfish self out from the centre of my life and putting God in its place.

Thomas Merton writes : “In meditative prayer, one thinks and seeks not only with his mind and lips but in a certain sense with his whole being. Prayer is then not just a formula of words, or a series of desires springing up in the heart; it is the orientation of our whole body, mind and spirit to God in silence, attention, and adoration. All good meditative prayer is a conversion of our entire self to God…….

“If we try to contemplate God without having turned the face of our inner self entirely in His direction, we will end up inevitable by contemplating ourselves, and we will perhaps plunge into the abyss of warm darkness which is our own sensible nature. That is not a darkness in which one can safely remain passive.

On the other hand, if we depend too much on our imagination and emotions, we will not turn ourselves to God but will plunge into a riot of images and fabricate for ourselves our own homemade religious experience, and this too is perilous.