Yes, we can. We can pray anywhere! Wherever we are, God is with us. God can hear and see us. God loves us… and is taking care of us! And who is a Father or Mother, and a caring human being, understands this! Yet, we are the ones who are stuck! We do not hear God, because we are generally indifferent! It’s our atavistic inertia! Our visceral laziness! Our ancestral sin! But Jesus tells us, ” Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door,” I will dwell with him/her etc. Any human being with common-sense on this planet knows, that is to say, receives the fact that the Living God is not only around them, but inside them! For without God we are nothing, nihil, rien, nada! A handful of dust and ashes; this is what we are without God! And isn’t that, after all, our ancestral sin?! How could it be, what could have happened, that we have “mythologies”?! We have departed (ontologically, as a being) from God! But the truth is, as Dostoevsky said, that in this world there are no atheists, beings without God; there are scoundrels and proud and idolaters; if you renounce God, said this colossal author, you still worship an idol of gold, silver, iron or clay and wood, and nowadays … a bank account. And the truth is: you cannot live without worshiping something, without believing in something!
And now let us return to the concrete question and the concrete answer dictated above all by common sense: we go and pray in Church because Church means “assembly“, it means “together” and because together we are stronger. and we find the sense of our own existence. Thus, we find God, we meet with Him, the Creator and Destiny of us all … And together it means not being alone in our ancestral loneliness, since, I don’t know how, we have rebelled against the Lord … and we have withdrawn from God…
“In the beginning,” it is said in the Old Testament, “the Spirit, [the Spirit of God] moved upon the face of the waters,” and over abysses and galaxies and universes not yet formed; it was all desolation, all void, but the Lord wanted in his infinite love for the Universe to be! And lo and behold, we are here too! We are here, on this planet, in the Milky Way. We are here! We live, we breathe. We have plans. We are thinking about the future. We raise children, we educate them, we enjoy them. Now, says this old man of yours, what would it be like to live without others? Desolation! Sadness! To whom would we boast or brag?! To whom would we complain?! With whom would we share everything we experience, everything we go through?!
It is true, our relationship with God is above all a PERSONAL one. God does not generally speak to the crowd, to the people, at least not since the fleeing from Egypt (but even there, and then, he spoke to Moses, Aaron, etc.); God always speaks to the heart of each one of us… Okay, but immediately after that, the next level in spiritual life, from our personal relationship with God, comes our relationship with the other/the community, the universal level. Because otherwise there would be no God! We would not exist in His image and likeness, instead God would be in the reduced versions of our imagination and representation… Well, that’s why we go to Church! That is why we meet with the Priest on Sunday, with all our brothers and sisters, and that is why our communal prayer, done together, is stronger than our personal one. Because we are ONE, one with our Creator God!
The Holy Fathers of the first Christian centuries, who walked through deserts, mountains, through valleys and holes, at the spiritual level which they had reached, no longer prayed for themselves, but for the entire humanity!!! They were ONE with the whole creation!!! They were talking to the lion, the wolf, the sparrow in the tree. For example, St. Seraphim of Sarov (but I could also recall here the “classic” Francis of Assisi centuries before) when someone knocked on the door of his monastic cell, in his efforts, received that person with the greeting: “Welcome, my joy!” In conclusion: our ancestors, those with true faith, were not senseless when they went to church. On the contrary, they knew they were one with God, more aware than we are today, the sons and daughters of a tired enlightenment!
Translated from Romanian by Raul Botha