Prayer: opening oneself to God's presence

Álex Muñoz has achieved something uncommon in today's spiritual literature: transmitting theological depth with a warm and approachable simplicity. His book How to hear God? A way to find His voicepublished this year, breaks with traditional and structured methods of prayer. As opposed to closed schemes or repetitive formulas, Muñoz proposes a liberating path, based on silence, surrender and the contemplation of love.

The center of his proposal is not to do much, but to be available: to stop controlling, to open oneself to the presence of God and to listen from the depths. "Don't treat God as your crutch or your magician; He is a Father who loves you more than anyone else."warns the author. With everyday examples - such as comparing the presence of God with the fat of the Iberian ham that permeates everything - he unites the transcendent with the ordinary, and demonstrates that the divine dwells in the most ordinary things.

His method is articulated in four clear, accessible and profoundly transforming steps: decentering, surrendering, writing and believing. These steps are not techniques or exercises, but interior attitudes that allow us to live an authentic, silent and fruitful prayer.

Decentering: to stop revolving around to oneself

The first step Muñoz proposes is to decenter oneself. It consists in getting out of the center of oneself. Many obstacles to a living and deep prayer come from being too busy with our own thoughts, fears, desires or problems. The soul, when it turns in on itself, becomes noisy and self-referential.

Decentering is not denying oneself or fleeing from oneself, but opening oneself to the Other. It is to recognize that the real center is not me, but God. It is an act of humility that transforms the starting point of prayer. Muñoz puts it this way: to move from "I have to pray" at "Sir, here I am.".

This step invites us to stop, breathe, be silent and become aware that God is already present. We do not need to fabricate or force him. Just be. Just to make ourselves available. To disengage is to empty ourselves gently, without effort, in order to be able to receive.

Surrender: to place all that we are in God's hands.

The second step is to surrender. If decentering empties us of the IIn this way, surrender makes us available to God. Here, prayer becomes an act of trust. 

To surrender is to offer to God what one is and lives at that moment, without filters: joys, tiredness, wounds, confusion, desires, loved ones.

It is not a matter of explaining anything in detail, nor of resolving inner issues beforehand. To deliver is to present everything as it is, with simplicity, with truth, with an open heart. In other words: "Lord, this is me. Take me as I come today.".

Muñoz insists that prayer often stagnates because we do not let go of what weighs us down. We continue to control, to retain, to watch. To surrender is to let go. It is to abandon one's own schemes so that God can act in freedom.

This gesture can be expressed with words, with a symbol (such as opening the hands), or simply with a silence full of intention and trust.

Writing: recognizing what has been heard and committing it to memory

The third step consists of writing, which adds a very particular nuance to Muñoz's proposal. In his method, writing is an active part of prayer. After silence and listening, the author proposes to write down what has been felt, understood or intuited in the presence of God.

It is not a question of writing long reflections or theology. It is enough to write down the essentials: a word of the Gospel that resonated, an interior image, a movement of the heart, a question, a gratitude. Sometimes, the annotation can be as simple as: "I didn't hear anything today, but I was with you.".

Writing has a double value. On the one hand, it orders and fixes internally what we have lived; on the other hand, it allows us to recognize over time the thread of God's passage in our life. It becomes a spiritual memory, like a notebook where God leaves his footprints.

This writing is not for others. It is intimate, sincere, and does not seek style or correction. It is an extension of listening, a way of saying: "This thing that happened with you, Lord, is real and I want to keep it.".

Believing: trusting in what is not seen

The fourth and final step is to believe. Here, the author touches the core of many contemporary difficulties in prayer: the tendency to measure everything by results or sensations. If we feel nothing, we believe that prayer has not worked. If there are no emotions, we think we have wasted our time.

Muñoz responds with an essential affirmation: God acts in the occult, although we do not see him. 

Often the fruits of prayer are manifested later. Sometimes without our realizing it. Therefore, believing means trusting that what we experience in prayer is true, even if it seems small or invisible.

To believe is a humble act. It is to come out of prayer without noisy certainties, but with the peace of having been with God. It is to trust that the Word has acted, even if we do not notice it. It is to go out into the day with the desire to live with more attention, with more openness, with more love.

This step turns prayer into life. Because, as the author rightly states, prayer does not end when the silence ends. It continues in everyday life.

The footprints of the saints

One of the most solid aspects of the book is how Alex Muñoz anchors his proposal in the experience of great spiritual masters, whom he presents not as idealized figures, but as real witnesses of an incarnated, living and concrete prayer.

St. Teresa of Jesus appears as a model of radical trust and intimate dialogue with God. Her affirmation -"to pray is to try to be friends, being many times alone with the one we know loves us".- becomes the affective framework of Muñoz's entire proposal. Prayer is relationship, not technique. It is a link, not an activity.

St. Therese of Lisieux, for her part, brings to the author tenderness and littleness as a spiritual path. Therese teaches that it is not necessary to know how to pray well in order to pray. It is enough to offer one's desire, even with poor words. Her childhood spirituality -"it is trust and nothing but trust that should lead us to love."- illuminates the entire itinerary.

St. John of the Cross brings the experience of silence and stripping. For Muñoz, John is key to understanding that many times God communicates without words, without light, without consolation, and that this apparent darkness is not absence, but mystery. The soul, says St. John, learns in not-knowing. Prayer can be dry, but no less true for that.

St. Josemaría Escrivá appears as the witness of a persevering prayer in the midst of daily life. In him, Muñoz recognizes a spirituality that unites work, interior silence and the presence of God. Prayer is not reduced to a moment, but is prolonged in concrete life, from the most simple and habitual.

The "useless" sentence

One of the most powerful ideas in the book is the one the author calls "useless prayer". This expression, far from having a negative sense, is a denunciation of the utilitarian spirituality that measures prayer by what it "produces". In contrast, Muñoz proposes a prayer that does not seek results, consolations or clarity. A prayer that is simply shared presence.

To pray without expecting anything. To be with God just because. That is, for Muñoz, the highest form of prayer: the one that does not demand, that does not manipulate, that does not instrumentalize God.

This "uselessness" is, paradoxically, the most fruitful. Because it frees from spiritual anxiety and opens the heart to an experience of God that does not depend on personal effort, but on grace. It is a prayer that is stripped, humble, silent. But it is also firm, faithful, trusting.

To practice it, this is enough:

-Sit in silence, with the certainty that God is.

-Do not seek to feel anything.

-Do not try to "get the sentence right".

-Just be. Just stay.

-And to go out with the confidence that being with God is enough.

A free and true spirituality

Alex Muñoz does not present just another method, but a different way of being before God. His book is not taught with formulas, but is transmitted as a testimony. The itinerary that he proposes - to concentrate, to surrender, to write, to believe - is in reality a pedagogy of the heart: silent, patient, humble.

At a time when spirituality runs the risk of becoming technical or emotional, this book reminds us that true prayer needs no embellishment, only truth. It does not require sophisticated words, only availability. And that God is not found in the spectacular, but in the small, the hidden, the faithful.

Because, in the end, hearing God is not a skill. It is a gift. And we only need to learn to listen to him in the only place where he always speaks: the heart.

The gospel, the key

The conclusion of the book emphasizes that praying and reading the Gospel is not a useful means or a manual of rules, but a personal encounter with God. Prayer, like love or beauty, is "useless" in the sense that it does not seek to achieve things, but has value in itself: God is the end, not the means.

The Gospel should not be reduced to moralizing or practical advice, but to the search for the face of Christ. The author invites us to enter into the Gospel scenes with our imagination, as one more character, following the example of St. Josemaría, who recommended treating Jesus, Mary and Joseph with trust and affection.

Even the most intense scenes - such as taking Christ down from the Cross - help to live the faith with realism and tenderness, making prayer and the reading of the Gospel an intimate, loving and transforming encounter with God.