by Fr Ian
Different types and different stages of prayer
We can divide prayer into two broad categories, which also describe the two main stages of progress in prayer: active and passive.
The early stages of Christian faith, the period of initial conversion, ascetic discipline and the development of basic Christian attitudes, tend to entail a lot of activity and effort on our part. As we progress spiritually we learn to rely far less on our own natural abilities and we surrender increasingly to God’s influence and direction.
Our personal prayer follows
the same pattern. To begin with most of us experience prayer as an activity
directed by ourselves towards God and involving a great deal of conscious
mental effort. There are barriers and resistances to be dismantled, habits of
concentration and attentiveness to be cultivated.
But the seemingly paradoxical
aim of all our initial effort and striving is to create a decrease of effort
and striving, and a growth of receptivity, docility, surrender and abandonment
to God’s grace instead. Over time, through the habit of prayer, God teaches us
to be more still, quiet and free from agitating preoccupations. We talk less
and move towards a state of calm, peaceful loving commitment to God, in keeping
with ‘the greatest commandment’.
So we can say that there are
two main factors at work in the growth of our prayer: first, a movement away
from effort directed by ourselves towards a passive receiving of the
spirit of prayer, infused into us by God; second, a movement away from a
mainly intellectual activity towards the expression of love for God,
encompassing our emotions and will and conscience - which is, again, an infused
gift of grace from God as he responds to our constancy and fidelity.
Four levels of prayer
In this post and the following post we’ll look at the four forms of active prayer, which every Christian has to begin with. These are:
A. vocal prayer;
B. mental prayer, or meditation;
C. affective prayer; and
D. the prayer of simplicity.
Later we’ll describe the
higher, passive, contemplative, types of prayer which really only make their
appearance when we’ve passed beyond the purgative stage of spiritual
development and entered into the illuminative and unitive stages.
A. Vocal prayer
Vocal prayer is the simplest, most basic and most common form of prayer. It consists of any prayer which is expressed in words, spoken aloud. As children, beginners or new converts to Christian faith we surely have to learn to pray to God in spoken words. Jesus taught the disciples a vocal prayer in the form of the Our Father. At the end of his earthly life, on the cross, he addressed God in the words of Psalm 22 and with his final breath commended himself into God’s hands.
The Catholic Church’s communal or public liturgy consists largely of vocal prayer: not only the Mass, the Eucharist, but also the celebration of other sacraments, like Baptism and the Anointing of the Sick.
The recitation of the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross, said privately or with others, are further forms of vocal prayer, as are the many novenas and litanies and acts of faith, hope and love, morning and evening offerings, and so on, that have developed in the Church’s spiritual tradition and been collected in manuals of prayer.
We can’t underestimate the value of
these types of prayer especially at the outset of Christian life but also
continuing throughout the whole of our Christian life.
Vocal prayer is extremely
helpful in arousing devotion to God, in giving God homage not only with our
mind and heart but with our body (lips, tongue, vocal chords), and in
expressing outwardly our interior spiritual sentiments.[10] For this
reason it’s often a valuable practice to begin our periods of prayer with the
slow, considered recitation of a vocal prayer, said aloud, which aids
concentration and helps to prevent distraction.
Two necessary dispositions
The Catholic spiritual tradition has determined that there are two main dispositions which are required to make vocal prayer a genuine conversation with God: attentiveness and piety.
We have to be attentive
to what we’re saying and conscious that we’re actually speaking to God. In
vocal prayer we can easily let our minds drift away onto other subjects while
continuing to recite the words. When this happens we can’t really claim that
we’ve been praying at all, and we have to make efforts to remain attentive or
else to pull our minds back to God again if we’ve given into distractions.
We also have to cultivate a disposition of piety, meaning that we direct our will towards God. According to the theologian Antonio Royo Marin piety encompasses several virtues all linked to each other and working together: charity, lively faith, confidence, humility, devotion, reverence and perseverance.[11]
‘Piety is so important for vocal prayer,’ he adds, ‘that it would be better by far to recite one Our Father piously and devoutly than to say many prayers in a routine and mechanical fashion’.[12]
Finally he warns against the futility of praying while fatigued, which inevitably hampers our ability to sustain a spirit of piety (and, we might add, also the necessary level of attentiveness).[13]
Vocal prayer might be the most basic form of prayer but that doesn’t mean that it’s in any way inferior to other forms. Vocal prayer will always play a large part in any Christian’s prayer life as a whole, no matter how far he or she advances in holiness.
And
even during our simple vocal prayers, alone in our room or perhaps during the
communal prayer of the Mass, God can inspire us with brief moments of
contemplative awareness and direct glimpses of himself, encouraging us to
persevere in our overall spiritual effort.
B. Mental prayer and meditation
In vocal prayer we address God outwardly and physically, using our voice. In mental prayer we direct our prayers to God silently and inwardly, in our minds. Our conversation with God takes place interiorly; we speak to him with our inner voice alone. Saint Teresa of Avila had this activity in mind when, in a very well-known sentence of her autobiography, she defined mental prayer as ‘nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him, who, as we know, loves us’.[14]
This is the broadest possible
definition. But in the Catholic spiritual tradition mental prayer has tended to
refer to a rather more specific activity: Christian meditation.
Meditation in itself is an
ordinary human thought process. It’s an exercise in calm, deliberative,
reflective thinking or pondering. Today many people without religious faith
engage in some form of meditation in order to relax, to concentrate better, to eliminate
anxiety. Their efforts are directed towards themselves, towards improving their
mental health, perhaps, or their work performance.
The subject matter of
Christian meditation, by contrast, is God - his nature, his will, the various
aspects of his relationship with us - and the goal is communion with God. As
believers, the motive that drives us to this kind of reflection is the desire
to know God more intimately and to penetrate the mysteries of faith more
deeply. No one with a dormant or mediocre faith will seek to cultivate a habit
of meditative prayer.
The ‘reasoned application of the mind’
Meditation is classed as an active form of prayer because in large degree it consists of mental effort on our part, an effort of our reasoning faculty. At its simplest level it consists of thinking about God, imaginatively pondering some truth of faith, to arrive at a better understanding of it.
As we proceed with this discursive type of thinking our mind will, among other things, produce images, analogies and concepts that help us to expand our understanding of our faith and strengthen our Christian convictions. Then our affections and will and conscience are drawn into the whole exercise and we move towards greater attachment to God, greater personal commitment, and towards concrete resolutions that we feel urged to put into practice in our daily life.
Of course God is completely involved in inspiring these thoughts, affections and resolutions. It’s with that fact in mind that Father Marin summarises the practice of meditation as ‘the reasoned application of the mind to some supernatural truth, in order to penetrate its meaning, love it and carry it into practice, with the assistance of grace’.[15]
Meditation is in large part an intellectual exercise, a
form of thinking, but the thinking is really only the means. The end
is to arouse a deeper love and commitment towards God and to all his revealed
truths.
The basic pattern
There are many methods of Christian meditation, which for the most part have their roots in the special charisms of the various religious congregations (Carmelite, Ignatian, Sulpician and so on). The common or underlying pattern is always that of consideration - application - resolution.
In other words when we
meditate we first of all identify a particular subject for consideration or
reflection; then we think about how this particular truth of faith applies to
us personally; and finally we conclude by resolving concretely to put it into
practice. In a later post we’ll explain how to practise one particular type
of Christian meditation along these lines.
Helpful dispositions
What general attitudes or dispositions do we need to cultivate to practise meditation and benefit from it? What errors must we avoid?
Broadly speaking we should
approach meditation with the same receptivity to God’s grace that ideally
characterises all our prayer. That’s to say, we start out with the
acknowledgement that God produces the fruits of prayer, not us. Receptivity
also means being sensitive to what God may be trying to communicate to us, and
avoiding the tendency to project our own pet ideas and hobbyhorses into our
prayer.
If we use the Gospels as
material for meditation, for example, we can easily filter out aspects of
Jesus’ character and teaching that doesn’t harmonise with our pre-existing
prejudices. We fashion our own picture
of Christ instead of allowing ourselves to be challenged and changed and
moulded by the figure presented by the inspired authors. This actually
frustrates the action of God’s grace.
Another helpful attitude is
always to remember that meditation is actually prayer and not just some form of
study or speculative thinking. The reflective and ruminative nature of
meditation can easily lead to an exercise in mere wool-gathering; whereas it
should never cease to have the direct, personal, conversational dimension that
all prayer has.
That’s why the tried and
tested methods of Christian meditation always contain moments dedicated to
praise, adoration, thanksgiving, regret for sin and contrition, and requests
for help. That way we never forget that we’re not just reading or thinking but,
in Saint Teresa’s language, conversing on terms of friendship with God.
Forming a habit of prayer
When Christians start out at first to practise meditation one problem that they nearly always come up against is lack of experience. The solution is to strive to develop a regular daily habit of meditation, to persevere, so that as an activity it gradually becomes second nature.
With regular practice we find that our prayerful deliberation becomes easier to enter into, and also that the inspirations and affections come to us more quickly and powerfully, as they’re built up on the wealth of all our previous communications with God.
Allied to inexperience is perhaps a tendency to lose enthusiasm, to become tepid and sporadic, to lack generosity in giving time to prayer.
Here, as we’ll discuss later, the answer is to recall the necessity and primacy of prayer and also to establish a fixed routine of prayer, to find the right place, the best time, for prayer, and to organise all our other activities so that we’re very rarely deflected from our purpose.
(In the next post we'll look at affective prayer and the prayer of simplicity)
NOTES
[11] Antonio Royo Marin, O.P., The Theology of Christian Perfection, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, (orig pub. The Priory Press, 1962), p.513.
[12] Royo Marin, p.513.
[13] Royo Marin, p.513.
[14] Quoted in Reginald
Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life, Volume One, Tan
Books, Charlotte, North Carolina, 2013 (orig. pub. B. Herder Book Co., St.
Louis and London, 1947), p.531.
[15] Royo Marin, p.514.
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