These various prayers are all rather
essential to Catholicism; and included with them
are commentary on each, pretty much line by line.
How to Pray : |
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It's a surprizingly loaded question, in fact. Some seem to believe that one either emotes or effortlessly searches the rarity of the heavens, or the like, but that when compared with care and skill, perhaps even reason and dogma, this somehow becomes the false choice, the one side of the excluded middle, holding to one side. It can't be. It always must be both. By reason and dogma is the mystic engaged. That it must be both has been the sense of the saints, even while some may seem at times to suggest a distracted and careless prayer (only in the context of a saint, and the way she typically prays, might such makes sense). One cannot offer emotion, but one might well feel some emotion; or if nothing so superficial, then real devotion, love, commitment to the things of God – all ineffable, so all beyond words. One may seem to understand, but not be able to express it (and, yet, allow that others more gifted might be able). |
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Yet, such vision is not true if the prayer is not true – thus dogma, thus the actual words, below; the actual form used. One only falsely emotes if one is led by the very words of a prayer into misunderstanding and an unbalanced view of salvation. Thus, also, reason must guide the prayer, the sense of what the words and phrases really mean, overloaded and fecund with meaning as they most certainly are. |
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The Catholic, therefore, prays in a balanced and holy fashion – not dryly, but never carelessly, either – not with an eye on the mystic to the exclusion of reason, but to both. The prayer cannot be a mindless background chant, in which the words all run together and threaten to become something else, because the esteem in which you hold the words is the esteem in which you hold that which they signify. And the prayer cannot be simply a dry recitation, without consideration of the truth behind the words. Still, if one were to err on the side of careful pronunciation, and a slow cadence, then it would be preferable to any false mysticism which would relegate the words, and so the prayer, to irrelevancy in some unbalanced and misunderstood 'prayer experience'. |
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Sometimes, also, such is the remissness and negligence with which we
pray, that we ourselves do not attend to what we say. Since prayer is
an elevation of the soul to God, if, while we pray, the mind, instead
of being fixed upon God, is distracted, and the tongue slurs over the
words at random, without attention, without devotion, with what
propriety can we give to such empty sounds the name of Christian
prayer?
[Catechism of Trent, Part IV - The Lord's Prayer]
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Earthly wisdom of which St James speaks, is love for the things of this world. Worldly men secretly subscribe to this wisdom. . . Most of the time they are thinking, speaking, acting with the sole aim of acquiring or keeping some temporal possession. They pay little or no attention to their eternal salvation or to the means of saving their souls, such as Confession, Holy Communion, prayer, etc.; except in an offhand way out of routine, once in a while, and for the sake of appearances.
[St. Louis de Montfort, The Love of Eternal Wisdom, #80]
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A lukewarm soul is not yet quite dead in the eyes of God because the faith, the hope, and the charity which are its spiritual life are not altogether extinct. . . . Nothing touches this soul: it hears the word of God, yes, that is true; but often it just bores it. . . . Any prayers which are a bit long are distasteful to him. This soul is so full of whatever it has just been doing or what it is going to do next, its boredom is so great, that this poor unfortunate thing is almost in agony. It is still alive, but it is not capable of doing anything to gain Heaven. . . . He will not even stop working. . . . If it is a woman, she will say her prayers while slicing bread into her soup, or putting wood on the fire, or calling out to her children or maid. If you like, such distractions during prayer are not exactly deliberate. People would rather not have them, but because it is necessary to go to so much trouble and expend so much energy to get rid of them, they let them alone and allow them to come as they will.
[Sermons of the Cure de Ars, The Dreadful State of a Lukewarm Soul]
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