Of Prayer

Prayer

One of the things we need to appreciate is that we will never feel expert in prayer. Or if we ever do feel this then we have actually stopped being able to pray! And this is because the foundation of prayer (and also discipleship generally) is humility. Those spiritual 'giants' of prayer, like for example St John of the Cross or St Teresa of Avila, were 'giants' because they were saintly humble. So prayer is not something we become expert in like other things. When we learn how to do something normally speaking we start to become proficient. It is not quite like that in prayer. We must remain humble - we must remain 'beginners'.

The next little tip I would offer is that prayer requires moral effort. With most virtuous things we do, if we practice them regularly then they start to become easier. So if we are trying to overcome a tendency to avarice and push ourselves to be generous, as we push ourselves more and more we start slowly becoming a generous person, until we require less and less effort to be generous. Generosity has then become part of our character. We are a generous person. This is not usually the case with prayer. It is likely that we will have to push ourselves to pray most of the time. In a sense, prayer will never become easy. Personally I am really sorry about that, and I wish it wasn't the case! What we are aiming for then, is not for prayer to become easy, but that we establish good habits of prayer. So for everyone we have to work in to our own unique lives habits of prayer that work for us. It has often been said to me, "Pray as you can, not as you can't." We have to be realistic. And I would usually suggest to people they start small and slowly build habits of prayer incrementally.

So what I would suggest is that you review some basic catechesis in prayer. Not least because we are all beginners in prayer. You might know some of it already, but that doesn't matter. You may have heard it before but perhaps you need the teaching to sink in a bit more. I would recommend the following catechesis on prayer by Daphne MacLoed. It is part of a series she did on "What Catholics Believe." In this catechesis. Daphne MacLeod starts at the very beginning with the principles and reasons for praying. She also recommends further reading, and the links to this are below the video.

The following is recommended reading by Daphne. The beginning of Part Four of the Catechism is found at the link below:-

PART 4 Section 1 (Prayer in the Christian Life)

On this site you get the catechism page by page. So once you have read the page you click the link "Next" and you then go on to the next page.