Blog - April 2023 RSS Feed

If the family is a privileged place of prayer, what keeps so many families from praying together more often? Our busyness surely has something to do with it: Sports practice, service requirements, and so many other things lay claim to our lives, and thus keep us from letting God lay His claim upon us.

Our discussion of the Mass last week reminds us that prayer is not just a private event. Private prayer is important, of course. Jesus even warns us not to use public prayer as a means of self-promotion, showing how “holy” we are (see Matthew 6:5– 6). But public and group prayer is important and valuable. It is important because Jesus encourages us to gather together to pray (see Matthew 18:20).

If being in the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is a privileged place of prayer, the greatest act of prayer we can take is participating in the Mass. In the Mass, we are not only invited to be in the presence of Jesus, but to come before him, to unite ourselves with his sacrifice re-presented on the altar, and finally to receive him not just spiritually but physically in the consecrated elements.

So far, our discussion of prayer has focused primarily on content: What should we say or think about? But, as I mentioned before, the location we pick for prayer matters too.

Last week, we discussed Lectio Divina, which is a very unstructured way to introduce oneself to praying through Scripture. For some people, that lack of structure is a freeing way to meditate on what God is saying in a particular passage. For people who want something a little more regimented, the Church offers a much more formalized way of using Scripture in prayer called the Liturgy of the Hours, or the Divine Office.