To begin our growth toward Christ, we need to learn how to pray, without prayer, we cannot hope to be good Christians, and we cannot hope to experience any growth. Prayer is so critically important for a Catholic.
What is prayer?
Prayer is our conversation and relationship with God, an invitation from God to become closer to Him. Without prayer, we cannot have a proper relationship with God, and we cannot be with God in the next life. Prayer is necessary. It is so blatantly and abundantly clear it is necessary, and yet, we often convince ourselves it is childish, not needed, ineffective, that we don’t have time, we don’t deserve to pray, and that God doesn’t have time for us. This is, of course, completely false. Self doubt is sown into our hearts by the enemy, hoping to keep us from the greatest love we could ever experience with Our Lord. The master of lies tries to keep us from prayer, which keeps us on our path to what God has made for us. We need to pray, and we need to become disciplined in prayer.
What happens in prayer?
Prayer starts with a desire to pray, or a feeling we need to pray even if we do not want to. Either way this stirring of our soul to enter into prayer comes from the Holy Spirit, guiding us and inviting us toward God. When we choose to pray, we are choosing to grow closer to God, through an act of our will. God already knows what we desire and pray for, so why would we need to pray? Because not only do we need to choose God, which we do through all our prayers, but God also wants us to participate in our salvation. As we pray, we are in the presence of God, and uniting our hearts to Him. This sort of union with God can only happen when we agree to it, so we need to actively pray.
What forms of prayer are there?
There are 5 different forms of prayer: Blessing and Adoration, Petition, Intercession, Thanksgiving, and Praise. To deepen our prayer life, it may be important to understand the differences and why they are different.
Blessing and Adoration-Through Blessing and Adoration, we bring to mind and acknowledge that we need God. In fact, without Him we cannot exist, because we are creatures, compared to an almighty God we are nothing. Yet to Him, we are not nothing, and we are so lucky to have someone we can depend on who loves us so completely.
Petition-This is what most people think of when it comes to prayer. Our desires for physical or spiritual goodness often stirs us toward asking our Almighty God for help, or for those things. These may or may not be answered in the way we want, but the act of asking still creates unity with Our Lord.
Intercession-Many times we are called to pray for others, pray for those who are going through a hard time and ask us to pray for them. There are probably times when you ask others to pray for you. This prayer is a form of charity, showing love for others and for God.
Thanksgiving-Sometimes God graces us with so much goodness that we feel compelled to thank Him. Other times we do not see all the good He does for us, and it is difficult to see why we need to thank Him. We should still muster the strength and humility to thank Him, however, because He always wants what’s good for us, and even if those good things are hidden from plain view, they are still there due to God’s love and intercession.
Praise-In Praise, we call to our own minds that God is so incredibly perfect. Through Praise, we show our love to this perfect God, just because He is God. Not because He does things for us, or does great deeds, but because He is God. So completely composed of pure love. Praise elevates all the other forms of prayer, because when we love God and have a relationship with Him, we are more accepting of His invitations to prayer, and He is more willing to impart graces that deepen our prayer life.
What are the Expressions of Prayer?
There are three main expressions of prayer: vocal, meditative, and contemplative. The Holy Spirit calls us to pray, and we respond to this prompting through one of these expressions.
Vocal Prayer- this is where everyone starts, and it’s still an important part of prayer life. Vocal prayer involves the use of our senses, utilizing the body. Because we are soul and body, this type of prayer helps to unite our entire being with God in a unique way. This type of prayer is the most common and can be used in community or family settings, in which a group of people are saying the same prayer. Vocal prayer unites our body with the interior prayer of our heart, and by praying in this way we are praying in the way that Christ Himself taught us when He taught us to pray the Our Father.
Meditation Prayer-in this type of prayer, we try to understand why we are Christian, why the Lord has called us to our current state of life, what Our God wants us to do. We use scriptures, writings of the saints, our own experiences, and feelings we discover in silence with Our Lord, to guide us in the big question all Christians should ask themselves, what does God want us to do with our life? It is described within the Catechism as a prayerful quest, to seek the answer to this important question.
Contemplative Prayer-the goal of contemplative prayer is to search for Jesus in silence, in our hearts. Contemplative prayer differs from meditative because it only seeks to find the presence of Christ and remain there for a time. Rather than using experience and writing to find guidance, contemplative prayer seeks only the friendship and love of God. It is described by St Theresa of Avila as “nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.”
In all of these types of prayers, we see this importance of uniting our entire selves to God. They do this in different ways, so in order to take steps toward God we need to find ways to utilize many ways of praying, all of which are included in these categories.
The Battle of Prayer
Because prayer is so crucially important for the life of a Catholic, it stands to reason that the enemy, who wants to drag us into the depths of hell, by our own choices and vices, would want to keep us away from prayer.
We also need to fight against ourselves, because we are the ones who desire more time for our recreations, feel we don’t have time, and find prayer as an inconvenience. There are also people who feel that prayer is simply a psychological exercise, or an attempt reach a mental void. This is a major problem because it strips from our prayers the major reason we actually started praying, our end goal, union with God. Prayer as a form of just feeling good, and as an erroneous notion, is not real prayer, because it is a rejection of God’s involvement and is self-indulgent. People also feel that prayer is unproductive, since many times there are no tangible results, as if prayer must be able to be measured to be true. Prayer also does not provide us with goods or objects unless God sees it as a way of salvation, so when people pray for things, and not receive them, they lose interest and lose faith in the actual importance of prayer. Periods of dryness in our prayer life also arise, the so called Dark Night of the Soul. Discouragement also comes when we do not feel holy enough, when we have wounded pride, or when we feel unheard according to our will, when The Lord will not do what we want.
Vigilance in Prayer
Distractions often assail us in prayer, attacking our mind, keeping us from deepening our focus on the one thing our focus needs to be on, Our Lord. The first thing most people do when a distraction arises is to shove it away, attck it with our will, exerting mental effort to erase it from out mind. This is the wrong approach, because as soon as we start exerting our mental effort, we have shifted our focus away from where it should be. It is a diabolical trap, and the best way to deal with it is to focus more on our heart and God. Focus on the union you are seeking. Distractions reveal to us what earthly things are attached to our heart, so we should present these things to Our Lord, asking for these things to be purified from it. We need to turn it around, presenting these distractions to Our Lord, to better our union, rather than trying to destroy them from our mind.
We need to also have faith in Our Lord, and often times we can be presumptuose, questioning whether we need to bring an issue to prayer with God. Do we need to pray? Can we handle it on our own? Would God even want to help me? These are temptations toward a lack of faith, and we need to learn to trust in Our Lord. We were called to prayer for a reason, we need help from the most powerful and loving Being in the universe, and we are called to pray constantly. With these truths in mind, we need to remind ourselves of the faith we need to have.
Acedia, also called the “noonday devil,” is a result a lax ascetical practices. It can happen at all times of the day, not just noon, and can be characterized by a type of moroseness, depression, laziness, disenchantment, or boredom. It is spiritual sloth. It can attack our desire to prayer, either making us decide not to when we were already going to, making us stop completely in the middle of prayer, or any number of ways. It destroys our will to continue praying. To fight against Acedia is a difficult battle, but not impossible. When you feal this despair related to prayer life, you need to examen yourself. This type of evil often seeps into our soul through all the small actions we do. It is often the small things that count. We need to bring these to mind and make them the subject of our prayer. We also need to think of all the small gifts we have received throughout the day, which will give us even more to pray about. A strong trust in God’s mercy is important to combat this, as these feelings often come from a belief that all is lost, so why even try? This is of course not true, as Catholics we know that not all is lost, and everything can be redeemed.
What now?
Go pray! Use what you know about the different forms of prayer, and pray for things you don’t often pray for. Use the different expressions of prayer to pray in ways you don’t often pray. Use the knowledge that pray is a battle as a way to stand resolute and with vigilance against the forces that try to keep us from prayer. And most importantly, seek that union with God, as that is what prayer is for, and never stop seeking it.