Fr. Thomas M. Pastorius February 5, 2017 Spiritual Ponderings I would like to devote this month’s spiritual ponderings into a series of reflections on prayer with the hope that your prayer life and my own will grow and bring even closer to the Lord.
Prayer, I have come to believe is one of those things that many people tell us we should do but very few people know exactly how to pray themselves and even less know how to teach others how to pray. This is sad because prayer is such an important part of the life of a Christian. If I could go back in time and teach myself to pray as I do now, these would be the ten things I would stress.
1. Pray As You Can One morning in the parish office the pastor and his two associates were arguing what was the best position for prayer as an internet repair man worked nearby.
“Kneeling is definitely the best posture for prayer,” the pastor claimed.
“No, you are wrong,” chimed in one of the associates. “I find the best way to pray is to stand up and stretch your hands outward towards heaven.”
“You are both wrong,” insisted the third priest. “The most effective stance for prayer is lying prostrate face down on the floor.”
The repair man could not contain himself any longer. “He fathers,” he interrupted, “the best praying I ever did was when I was hanging upside down from a telephone pole.”
Growing up many people told me that I needed to pray but no one ever really took the time to teach me to pray. When I entered the seminary, I felt like I was way behind my brother seminarians when it came to prayer. This problem was magnified by the fact that I found myself focusing on the ways other prayed instead of learning how to pray.
One day someone told me that St. Ignatius of Loyola stated that “we should all pray as we can and not as we can’t.” Upon hearing this statement, I found a new interest in discovering different styles of prayer. This searching eventually led me to me to journaling prayer. As I begin to pray I pretend that I am a child at summer camp and that I am writing my Father in heaven about all the things that have happened throughout the day. There are days in which I write a lot and there are days I write a little, throughout both experiences, I feel that God speaks to me in the silence of my heart as I ponder what to write and what to do next in my life.
I also have a good friend, who loves to write but he has come to realize that his writing is not prayer because all he does put his ideas on paper and there is no conversation taking place with God. He has discovered the best way for him to pray is to use his imagination. He simply imagines Jesus and him having a conversation.
Praying as you can and not as your can’t makes sense because each of us is different. My mother who has six children knows that she has to approach each one of us differently because we each have our own needs but more importantly we each have our own talents and strengths. My mother knows that I often I just need someone to talk to and to tell my story to knowing that I won’t be judged. My mother has come to learn that the worst thing she can do when I am like this is offer advice because her advice, no matter how good, just makes me angry. On the other hand I have a brother who when telling her his problems wants her advice and if she would offer him none than he would be upset. We are each different in our own ways and thus we each build our prayer life a little differently.
2. Formal prayer/Informal Prayer If a major league baseball pitcher has only a fastball in his repertoire he will not be a good pitcher. He has to eventually develop an off-speed pitch to compliment his fastball in order to become a better pitcher. In the same way formal prayer (prayers that everyone knows or can memorize) and informal prayer (prayers in which are impromptu or spontaneous) are meant to complement each other.
When I was learning to pray spontaneously and to express to God what was on my heart, I found myself begin to develop a disdained for formal prayers like the Our Father and Hail Mary. A wise priest helped me see the errors of my way when he explained that there are sometimes things that we simply do not have the words to express what we are feeling or what we want and so these formal prayers are a great way of letting God that I trust Him and I want His will to be done despite the fact that I don’t have any other word express what is on my heart.
I also know that if my prayer life only consists of formal prayers my relationship with God will stall. It is important that I share with Him what is in my heart through informal prayers. God wants to know what is going on in my life, not because He doesn’t know, but because it is a bonding experience and He loves me.