Dear Jonathan,

Peter and the apostles were so taken with the way Christ prayed, it must have seemed so personal and special to them, so different to their own experience, that they also asked him this same question. They said, "Lord, teach us to pray" and as a path and model to follow Jesus gave them and us the Our Father.

To pray, you start with what God has given you. In Baptism he made you his son and he gave you the triple gift of faith, hope and love. So, start from there. If you think about it, you wouldn't be asking this question if you didn't believe in God and know it is a very good thing to pray (faith), if you didn't hope that you can do it, and if you didn't love him enough to want to do it. So, what Jesus says is true, no-one can come to me unless the Father calls him, and here are you trying to answer the Father's call.

Personally, I like to keep prayer simple. We are creatures, he is God, and we will never be able to get our minds around all his goodness and wisdom and power. We can try to enter into the mystery, but we can never understand or grasp it fully. Fortunately, we are not trying to penetrate Gods mystery from the outside, God has actually come out of himself, become one of us ("whoever sees me sees the Father"), and then through Baptism, thanks to Christ's merits on the Cross, he has made us sharers in his life.

Whenever you begin to pray, it is very good to remember this. Prayer is a conversation, and sometimes we think that this means that first we speak and then we have to wait for his answer, and of course we don't always hear it. But isn't it really the other way around? Hasn't God already spoken and isn't the part that's missing our listening to him? God has spoken in creation, in his individual creation of each one's soul, in redeeming us, in the Gospel, in the Church, in the Sacraments. Prayer is opening up our minds to him, listening to what he has already said and continues saying through his words and actions, and then what we say in prayer should really be really our reply to all his love and his revelation.
There are times of course when we understandably plunge into prayer by immediately pouring out our needs, worries and pain, but when we pause to listen to him we shouldn't expect to hear new words. By listening to Christ in the Gospel, by being attentive to the Holy Spirit who is active in our souls, we will get the replies we are looking for in those same words of Christ, a parable, a miracle, a teaching of the Church about grace, the cross, human nature, etc.

But maybe I'm not really helping you with this. We truly connect one-on-one with God by exercising our faith, renewing our hope and trying to love him as he deserves. The person-to-person contact with God is not something we necessarily feel, it is something we KNOW. This is obvious in Communion, but every time we pray if we just say to God, you are my Father, you have made me your son in Christ through baptism. You are my creator, if you weren't thinking of me now I would cease to exist. You loved me so much you sent your Son to die on the cross for me. I truly believe this, and in the confidence this gives me I place myself in your presence.

Then, what do we do during prayer? There are many ways to pray. Since you are increasingly sure God is calling you to be a priest, I would recommend that you simply read a passage of the Gospel. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you to get to know Christ, and reflect on what you are reading. Examine to see what Christ is saying to you, why he did what you are reading about, how you can imitate him. Sometimes reading a Gospel commentary can help.

God bless. I'll keep you in my prayers.