By Fr Ian
Keeping in mind everything that we’ve covered so far, in this post and the next I’d like to advocate two simple and practical ways of praying. These are two concrete practices that can help us move beyond a superficial level of prayer towards a more contemplative experience, strengthening the bond of communion between ourselves and God in the process.
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Preparation for prayer: recollection
First let's recognise that if we want to pray well we can’t just turn rapidly from our ordinary daily activities and glide easily into profound conversation with God. We have to prepare ourselves beforehand. The Catholic spiritual tradition envisages three stages of preparation for prayer: immediate, proximate and remote.
Immediate preparation takes
place at the beginning of each prayer time and in actual fact constitutes the
first step in the prayer itself: the effort to disengage from various thoughts,
concerns and preoccupations, to become calm and recollected and to focus attentively
on God. We’ll describe this immediate preparation in a little more detail
below, in connection with the two suggested forms of prayer.
Proximate preparation,
meaning preparation close to, or near to, the time of prayer, refers to the
arrangements we make before the time of prayer to ensure that we can proceed
without distraction, fuss or confusion.
If we intend to meditate daily, for example, we choose our material in advance. If we meditate in the morning, we glance over tomorrow’s subject for prayer the evening before. If we record some of our reflections in writing we make sure that our notebook and pen are immediately available to us each time we settle down to pray.
The goal of this proximate preparation is to create the
conditions for effective prayer and maximum receptivity to God’s communication
to us.
Remote preparation consists of all the efforts we make to foster our continuing conversion and growth in holiness outside the times of prayer. It recognises that the activity of prayer takes place in a context formed by all the other aspects of Christian discipleship: the struggle against sin, the cultivation of the virtues and gifts, the sacramental life, and so on.
Prayer grows out of this general context and helps to reinforce all the elements that comprise it.
A contemplative attitude to life: silence, stillness, solitude
We can only develop a more contemplative way of prayer, and a more contemplative relationship with God, if we allow a more contemplative attitude to permeate every area of our life, and to this end there are some specific dispositions that we can cultivate as part of our remote preparation.
Broadly speaking these involve detaching ourselves from the preoccupations and stimulations that absorb so much of our time and energy; they involve disciplining, or mortifying, our psychological need for stimulation, either of the mind and imagination or of our five senses, and filling the space with God instead.
So, concretely, instead of seeking noise, we create a place and times when we can more frequently retreat into silence.
Instead of movement and bustling activity, including agitated mental activity, we cultivate stillness - external and physical as well as internal and spiritual.
Instead of the almost continuous social contact and company and conversation of fellow human beings which is very typical today, we withdraw into solitude and deliberately choose to be alone with God. Instead of always talking freely, expressing our views and opinions along with everyone else, we refrain more and more from speaking, and listen more instead; that way we practise in our human relationships the aimed-for pattern of our relationship with God.[1]
In classical Catholic spirituality the term used for all these dispositions, taken together, is recollection, which we can regard as the most important part of our remote preparation for prayer.
Christian meditation
In his book, Prayer Primer, the Servite priest Father Thomas Dubay proposes a valuable and easy method of Christian meditation.
The essential feature of meditative prayer is receptivity on our part. Of course we approach God in prayer to share with him our thoughts, needs, desires and preoccupations, and to ask him for help, but in meditation we’re more concerned to listen to what God is trying to communicate to us, to open our personality and character to his transforming influence, and to discern what direction he wants to guide our life in.
According to Father Dubay:
‘Just as you and I get to know people by meeting, listening, and speaking to them, so in meditation we get to know God interpersonally by conversing with him in a quiet place: “When you pray, go into your private room, close the door and pray to your Father in that secret place (Mt 6:6).” We listen to him speaking to us through the beauties of nature, Sacred Scripture, the texts of the liturgy, the lives and writings of the saints.
Pointedly Jesus declared in completely explicit terms that we hear him when we listen to the Church teaching in his name: “He who hears you, hears me” (Lk 10:16).
In meditation we ponder what he says to us in all these ways, and then we respond with our inner thoughts, applications, and words. It is a mental conversation between two friends coming closer and, as time goes on, becoming more and more intimate’.[2]
The subject matter of this conversation between ourselves and God can be anything from the profound questions of Christian faith, such as the inner nature of the Trinity, the salvation won for us through Jesus’ passion and death, or the prospect of final judgement, to the more immediate, mundane issues, such as controlling our temper, eating fewer sweets or visiting someone who’s sick.[3]
This
will all depend on the material we decide to use for meditation and the way we
go about it concretely. Here are the five steps Father Dubay suggests for meditative prayer:
Choose a suitable time and place. The place should be somewhere quiet, somewhere we can be alone and where we can be more or less certain of not being disturbed. The same goes for the time of day. We need to be sure of being able to dedicate a clear twenty or thirty minutes, or longer, exclusively to the activity of conversing with God, without other activities interrupting or intruding.
Step Two
Become recollected. Take time to relax, to become still, physically and exteriorly as well as mentally and interiorly. Father Dubay advises that we gather ourselves together inwardly, in mind and heart, as an athlete might concentrate mentally in order to perform well.[4]
We focus our attention on God and become aware of his presence. It’s a good idea to begin with a vocal prayer, either using a well-known prayer like the Our Father or else praying in our own words, along the lines of: ‘Lord, I know that you are here, that you can see me and hear me. Your reveal yourself to me and communicate your life to me. Help me to learn how to speak to you and listen to you’.
We can help ourselves to become recollected by calling to mind that God loves us, never ceases to draw us into closer contact with him, and wants nothing more than for us to turn to him, to spend time in his presence and to open our ears to the communication he wants to make to us. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that prayer is mainly the work of God dwelling in us, not our work. We don’t produce the fruits of prayer; God does.
Step Three
Provide ‘input’ for meditation in the form of a passage of Scripture or whatever other spiritual writing we’ve decided to use. There are many resources we can use but the four gospels are by far the best input we can provide for ourselves because they place us in direct contact with the Son of God and with his salvific words and actions: there isn’t a single area of Christian life that we’ll miss out if we use the gospels as our main source of meditative prayer.
We should take only a few verses at a time, a section of Jesus’ teaching, a particular incident, and read the passage slowly and thoughtfully, in a calm, unhurried, unpressured way, several times. We’re not sitting an exam, and we’re not going to be marked or graded on how much mental ‘material’ we produce within a fixed amount of time. It might take us several years to make our way through all four gospels, meditating on a small section every day. The point is to be receptive to the way that God steadily re-fashions us in his image and leads us forward in holiness through our calm pondering of the texts we’ve chosen.
Step Four
We move from reading, reflecting and pondering to making a response. We apply what we’ve read to ourselves, to our personal circumstances and goals in life at this precise moment. We converse with God about what we’ve just read and respond not only with thoughts and ideas but with emotions and movements of our will. As Father Dubay puts it: ‘The reading, pondering, and applying prepare us for the heart of Christian meditation: adoring, loving, praising, thanking and sorrowing with inner quiet words’.[5]
These emotional reactions and impulses of our will are as much a part of prayer and of our growing friendship with God as the increased understanding that we’re likely to derive from meditation. The Catechism underlines this fact: ‘Meditation engages thought, imagination, emotion and desire. This mobilisation of faculties is necessary in order to deepen our conviction of faith, prompt the conversion of our heart and strengthen our will to follow Christ’ (CCC 2708).
The main difference between meditative prayer and a purely intellectual study of spiritual writings is that prayer is a person-to-person relationship, a two-way communication between ourselves and God, in which we respond with all our faculties, reason, emotion, will. We find that’s there’s something in every passage we read that encourages us to respond with thanks, with adoration, with repentance, with a desire to commit ourselves more thoroughly. This is a response of the whole person, not only of the mind.
Step Five
Response leads us to the final stage: resolution. We determine to do something specific, starting today, and related to what we’ve just been reading and pondering. We resolve to change and grow so that our actions match our prayer. We should end our meditation, Father Dubay says, by asking ourselves, ‘What am I going to do about all of this in the concrete details of my daily life?’.[6]
‘Things must change for the better if we are to grow in prayer. A vague wish to improve is not enough. Because meditation is at the core of coming closer to God (and therefore to others as well), it should lead to tangible results in the practical order of our behaviour. Hence, ordinarily you want to conclude this daily prayer period with some specific resolutions to improve, to grow in some virtue or get rid of some fault.'[7]
The
practical question arises: how much time should we devote to this kind of
prayer?
The answer is that, first of all, really we have to put time aside every day for a period of meditation along the lines just described. The benefits of meditative prayer depend on it being regular and habitual, whereas if our prayer is sporadic and undisciplined we’re liable to make slow spiritual progress.
Second, we should probably recognise that anything less than twenty minutes or half an hour, with ten minutes or more spent on the activities of steps three and four, is bound to introduce an element of rush and pressure, which can only erode the atmosphere of prayer. It also risks being too short a time to elicit any really worthwhile responses.
If we feel pushed for time we’re more likely to go
through the motions quickly and mechanically, which wouldn’t be real prayer,
real communication with God.
Meditation by its nature requires a state of stillness and quiet and temporary detachment from other preoccupations, and most of us take time to enter into that state. But if someone is able to become relaxed and recollected relatively quickly, as a result of establishing the habit of meditating every day, with the chosen ‘input’ marked out and got ready beforehand, then it’s difficult to see how even a short period of such prayer could fail, cumulatively, to have a beneficial effect.
NOTES
[1] See Franz Jalics, S.J., The Contemplative Way, pp. 76-78, for four exercises that entail listening to other people and disciplining our desire to express our own views and opinions, as a way of training ourselves to listen to God in prayer.
[2] Thomas Dubay, S.M., Prayer Primer, Ignatius Press, pp. 67-68.
[3] Dubay, p. 69.
[4] Dubay, p.71.
[5] Dubay, p.71.
[6] Dubay, pp.75-76.
[7] Dubay, p. 76.
[8] Dubay, p. 76.
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