What is your favorite method of prayer?
To “pray without ceasing,” as St. Paul tells us (1 Thess. 5:17). To blend prayer with everything else. To make work a prayer. To overcome the separation between religion and life, the unfortunate idea we all have that “religion” is something different from life, something “pious” or “for religious people” or only for special times and places; something that ordinary sinners and cynics and selfish people dismiss.
The only way to do that — to overcome that superstition ―
is with prayers that are unconscious rather than conscious, because it’s not
psychologically possible to concentrate on praying while you are concentrating
on solving math problems or catching a wave or swatting a fly. And when the
prayers are conscious, and verbal, make them very short but frequent — such as
“Yes, Lord” or “Fiat”
or “Ad
te, Domine” (offering it up). Or even a gesture: the Sign
of the Cross if you are alone, or a salute (to help you remember who your
Commanding Officer is) that does not look like a salute, and thus is not
intrusive. Your Morning Offering (of all
your prayers, works, joys, and sufferings) establishes
this; frequent reminders simply frequently remind you of it. You don’t have to
be very pious or holy or contemplative or “religious” just to touch your
forehead.
My second answer is praying Scripture,
reading the Bible as prayer, conversing with God about it. It’s His love letter
to you, after all. Like almost everybody else, my favorite Scriptures for
prayer are the psalms, the prayer book God Himself gave us and the one Jesus
and His disciples used, the one Jews have used for three thousand years. The
more you pray them, the more you see in them, even the ones that seem at first
hard and polemical and even self-righteous. God put them there for us to use.
Just remember who your real “enemies” are: your own sins, and the evil spirits
who tempt you.
My
third answer is the Rosary, John Paul ll’s favorite prayer, too. It has power.
Our
main problem is time: we resist giving time to God. So I take a five-minute
hourglass, and I turn it upside down, and I pretend that the next five minutes
is the only time I will have because I will die in five minutes. What do I say
to God?
I tried setting a watch alarm to go off at 3:00 p.m.
every day to remind me to take this holiest of all times, the time Christ died,
to pray for a minute. But that didn’t work because I have ADD and I forgot to
set it, and I didn’t hear it, and I goofed up setting it (I’m capable of
messing up even the simplest mechanical device), and I eventually lost the
watch. I tried to do it without an alarm but failed miserably.
Oh, and find some other prayer time besides
first thing in the morning and last thing at night (though they should be your
first brief thought of God and your last), because those are the two times when
there are the most sleepy cobwebs in your brain. Give God a set amount of time
every day. Start with something realistic and doable, such as five minutes, or
even one; more is better than less, but something is better than nothing.
When, where, and how are not as important as just doing it.
What methods do you recommend for prayer and meditation?
Method
is only 1 percent of the solution; 99 percent is to do it, to start, whichever
method you use.
This is
essential: just do it.
Here
is a simple, nonthreatening, no-risk path to health and happiness, an open door
right in front of us, and we turn away from it because we say we don’t have the
time for it. We are slaves to time, or rather to false time, to clock time, to
our schedule time.
But if you give God even a little bit of the loaves and
fishes of your time, He will miraculously multiply them, and at the end of the
day, you will feel that you have accomplished surprisingly much. On the other
hand, if you grasp your loaves and fishes to yourself, they will not taste all
that good, or they will rot, or they will diminish. It works that way every time.
But
in order to “stop and smell the roses,” you first have to stop doing the stuff
you are doing, whatever it is. Ask yourself honestly and sanely (even insane
people have a well of sanity in them):
How important is
that stuff?
Are you God?
Will the universe cease to exist if you take your hands off it for
fifteen minutes?
My favorite sermon of all time is the shortest one I ever heard. (I have ADD and get bored very quickly.) God preached it to St. Catherine. He said, in effect, “I will now sum up all of divine revelation in four words, in just two two-word sentences. Here is everything I have been trying to get across to you every moment of your life and in every page in the Bible: I’m God; you’re not.”
The reason we have to keep returning to meditation is that we keep forgetting both parts of that sermon.
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This article is from a chapter in Ask Peter Kreeft: The 100 Most Interesting Questions He’s Ever Been Asked. It is available from Sophia Institute Press as well as your local Catholic bookstore.
Photo by Julia Solonina on Unsplash
