Christian Prayer: reflections from a Catholic perspective (1)

by Fr Ian  

Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:6-7.)

A Carthusian monk praying in his cell

In a series of six or so posts I’d like to try to broadly define the nature of Christian prayer, to spell out some of the different types and grades of prayer, and to explain some of the attitudes we need to cultivate in order to pray, and to pray well. 

In addition to that, I’ll try to present some reassuring facts about prayer, to help counter the discouragement we can easily feel towards an activity that most Christians have always found difficult - difficult to grasp and difficult to practise. 

Then, to end with, I’ll outline two specific ways of prayer: meditation using Scripture, or perhaps some other appropriate spiritual writing, and a simple form of contemplative prayer advocated by the Mill Hill Missionary Father James Borst.

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The necessity and primacy of prayer

Prayer for most of us is a somewhat mysterious and obscure activity. It doesn’t come easily to us, for a number of reasons. And yet the truth is that we all have a hunger and a need for prayer. Prayer is a necessary activity in the life of every Christian believer (and, as we would see things, in the life of every human being) and ideally as Christians we regard it as the primary activity of our life. 

It’s a necessary and primary activity in the negative sense that, when we neglect it, all our other activities tend to prove fruitless and worthless, at least in terms of our growth in love and holiness.

But personal prayer is also important in a more positive sense. 

It’s mainly by way of the conversation of prayer that we bridge the abyss that exists between ourselves and God, who is all-holy. It’s mainly through prayer that we foster a real, intimate, person-to-person relationship with God and discover the specific vocation in Christ that he invites each of us to embrace.

As the Dominican theologian, Father Dominic Hoffman, remarks, prayerful conversation with God is simply ‘the way in which we come closest to dealing with him as a person’.[1]     

Unfortunately, Christians today are often oblivious of the necessity and primacy of prayer. They tend to reverse the lesson of Jesus’ encounter with the two sisters, Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42), relegating prayer to second place behind various forms of activism, or, worse, efforts to foster a cosy, comforting ‘social club’ model of church membership which lacks real contact with God and the challenges of real discipleship.

The result is not only that prayer is effectively abandoned by many Christians today but that a general lack of prayer within the Church isn’t recognised for what it is: a grave, life-threatening deficiency both for individual Christians and for the community.

Spiritual shallowness, disorientation and complacency have never produced beneficial outcomes in the history of the Church, and so later on I’ll offer an interpretation of this drift towards prayerlessness within the contemporary Christian community and try to suggest some positive remedies.      

I.  A definition of Christian prayer

The essence of prayer is communication, communication between ourselves and God. It’s a two-way communication, then, a conversation.

As Christians we know from personal experience that on our part, when we pray, we speak to God. We offer various thoughts, emotions, needs, concerns, aspirations to God - anything that might occupy our minds at any given moment.

But we also become aware that, in the activity of prayer, God speaks to us. 

When we orientate ourselves towards God and begin to communicate with him he always responds, even if most of the time we’re not conscious of an obvious and immediate presence. God transmits his divine life and the qualities of his divine character to us. He communicates his intentions and plans for us personally, helps us see them more clearly and leads us progressively into a closer union with himself.

So it’s never solely a one-way communication from us to God, talking to him, making requests of him or even offering him heartfelt worship and praise. Prayer also entails careful listening on our part, an attitude of receptivity towards God’s incoming communication, a readiness to comply with his will as he reveals it to us, and a readiness to co-operate with his sanctifying grace. 

Prayer: praise and petition

What, then, does conversation between ourselves and God consist of? What should we say, and what should actually pass between ourselves and God when we pray?

The immediate answer to these questions lies, I think, in the classical definition of Christian prayer, as formulated by Saint John Damascene (c.676-749): ‘Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God’ (quoted in paragraph 2559 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church).

Saint John of Damascus (or 'Damascene')

Saint John’s definition presupposes, first of all, that God is a person, not some cosmic energy or force; also that God doesn’t conceal himself from us but makes himself known to us and present to us. And because we are persons too, made in God’s own likeness, we’re able to communicate with him. We’re able to enter into a relationship of love with him, and we’re able to ask him to help us and confer his benefits upon us.

Prayer of praise

The first part of the classical definition - the raising of one’s mind and heart to God - emphasises the vertical movement of prayer: the fact that prayer is communication on the part of finite, limited - and fallen – creatures, reaching up towards their divine Creator, who is perfectly good, truthful, loving and holy. 

Human beings are persons made in God’s own image and likeness, but God lives on a completely different level of existence from us, infinitely above the human level. So our prayer has this necessary element of turning our attention upwards, of consciously raising ourselves above the horizontal or purely mundane level of our lives, so as to enter into dialogue with God.  

We lift ourselves up to God in praise and worship and adoration to the extent that we’ve sensed, however dimly and partially, the majesty of his being, his divine nature, the fact that he’s infinite and eternal, without any beginning or end in time. 

The more profoundly we become conscious of God’s transcendence, in other words, and of the perfection of his holiness, love and goodness, the more we feel the desire to ‘fall on our faces’ (Mt 2:11;17:6) and express reverence, honour, glory, adoration - which are really all different aspects of our growing love for God.

The Book of Psalms is full of examples of this kind of prayer, rendered in vivid poetical language. Our Lady, Jesus' mother, offered up a song of praise to God in the Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55). And we make our own the worship of the angels (Lk 2:14) when we pray the Gloria together during Mass.

Individual contemplative prayer is another expression of the prayer of praise, insofar as it consists of the creature kneeling reverently in front of its Creator, striving to abide in God’s presence in a state of receptivity, tranquil adoration and loving regard. 

We can also include under this heading the desire to express thanks to God for everything that he gives us and does for us, not only in the small events of our daily lives, but as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, as the all-holy God who imparts his holiness to us.

And even the dispositions of sorrow and repentance, which we feel compelled to present to God as we come to understand that our sinful thoughts and actions show irreverence and ingratitude towards him, can be counted as a type of praise, because they arise from our acknowledgment of God as the transcendent source of all love and moral good, which we constantly fall short of.        

In all these different impulses of prayer we approach God as finite creatures acknowledging and praising him as our infinite, eternal Creator and Father - motivated ultimately, again, by a growing love for him. Our limited minds can never grasp or apprehend the full reality of God, but we can bow down before him. In fact we’re drawn to bow down in homage before God precisely because we’re unable to fully apprehend the fulness of his divine being.     

Prayer of petition

The second part of Saint John Damascene’s definition is ‘the requesting of good things from God’ (‘good’ here meaning: ‘appropriate’ or ‘spiritually beneficial’).

In this type of prayer we ask or petition God for his help or support, for some kind of action on our behalf; we ask him to give us something that we lack or feel we need. Under this heading we can also include our prayers of intercession, by which we request God to offer his help to, or bestow some favour on, another person or persons.

There are a few aspects of this prayer of petition that are worth mentioning briefly.

The first is that ‘asking God for things’ isn’t selfish and wrong in principle. On several occasions Jesus instructed his followers to turn to God in every eventuality of their lives, to ask God to provide their every need, and to persevere constantly in asking. He also reminded them that God knows all our needs before we even ask and insisted that they persevere with their petitionary prayer, pestering God like a widow pestering an unjust judge (Luke 18:1–8). 

One lesson here is that when we pray persistently for God’s assistance we're not trying to somehow change God's mind from one course of action to another. We're ensuring that we never lose sight of the essential nature of our relationship with God: our dependence on him and the appropriateness of having recourse to him in all our needs, spiritual and material.

A second important lesson, or implication, following on from this, is that there are things which God intends for us which he will give to us without our asking, but there are other things he will never grant to us, even though we might pray hard for them; and finally there are things that God will only grant to us if we pray persistently for them.

This pattern arises again from the essential nature of our relationship with God. He’s not a fairy godmother who grants every request we make of him. Rather, in his wisdom and knowledge of our true needs - far greater than our own - God assumes direction of our life to the extent that we learn to orientate ourselves to him and follow his will for us. Our petitionary and intercessory prayers, asking God for what we need, take place in this context. 

But if we choose to take nothing to do with God, and never request his guidance, he leaves us alone and never forces his help onto us against our will.

Jesus himself engaged in petitionary prayer throughout his life, asking God to accompany him and strengthen him especially during the major events and turning points of his ministry (the temptations in the desert, for example, or the moment of crisis in the Garden of Gethsemane). Jesus also requested God’s blessing for his followers, notably in his great prayer of intercession, the ‘High Priestly Prayer’ in chapter 17 of Saint John’s gospel. 

So, offered in the right spirit Christian petitionary and intercessory prayer actually expresses our need for God, our dependence on God, our recognition that we’re not self-sufficient. It constitutes an act of homage towards God in the sense that, contained in every request for help, is the recognition of God’s dominion over every area of our life.

As Saint Augustine famously remarked, before God we are all beggars.

(The next part of this reflection is here)

NOTES

[1] Dominic Hoffman, O.P., Beginnings in Spiritual Life, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 2013 (orig. pub. Daughters of Saint Paul, 1967), p. 103.