March 1992 Print

By Emanuel Valenza

A study of Christ’s life reveals that He prayed without ceasing. The Gospel of Mark informs us that He went without sleep for the sake of prayer (1:35) - no doubt this happened regularly. One example: Our Lord prayed all night before choosing His disciples (Lk. 6:12-13). During His baptism by St. John, He was in prayer (Lk. 3:21). He prayed, too, the moment of His Transfiguration (Lk. 9:28). The disciples find Him praying “in private” (Lk. 9:18). Before resurrecting Lazarus from the dead, Jesus prayed “that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me” (John 11:42). After the multiplication of the loaves, He sent everyone away and retired to the mountains to pray (Matt. 14:23). At the Mount of Olives He prayed that His Father’s will be done (Matt. 26:42). The famous priestly prayer was said at the Last Supper. Even His last words were a prayer: “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit”
 (Lk. 23:46).

When Christ finished “praying in a certain place,” His disciples asked, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Lk. 11:1). He of course taught them the “Our Father” Scripture in general instructs us how to pray by mentioning qualities inherent in prayers which are “His delight” (Prov. 28:9).

Prayer must come from the heart. Flowing from the will stabilized by the intellect. We should reflect on what is said, not rush; and avoid “making pretense of long prayers” (Mk. 12:40). Yahweh rejected the prayers of the Israelites as merely the recital of words:

“This people draw near Me with their mouth, and with their lips from Me” (Is. 29:13). That prayer must be sincere is ex-pressed by Shakespeare in his inimitable style: “My words fly up; my thoughts remain below; Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” (Hamlet, act III, scene II)

A good prayer manifests humility. “The humble man’s prayer pierces the clouds” (Eccles. 35:17). The Parable of the Pharisee and Publican (Lk. 18:9-14) contrasts the prideful prayer of the former, with the humble and contrite prayer of the latter. Christ warned,

“Everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.”

Confidence that our prayers “have gone up and been remembered in the sight of God” (Acts 10:4) is essential. Christ Himself promised, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it shall be opened” (Matt. 7:7-8)

As St. Paul frequently reminds us, we should persevere in prayer (Rom. 12:12; Col. 4:2; Eph. 6:18). Recall the Parable of the Godless Judge: If an unjust, disrespectful judge eventually hears the indefatigable woman’s plea, how much more will a just and merciful God hear assiduous prayer.

Because prayer “is the raising of the mind and heart to God,” it must be, like all genuine conversation, attentive: our mind, heart and will should be fixed on God. “My son, give Me thy heart.” (Prov. 23-26).

If we give our hearts to God, He will sanctify us; that is, make us holy. This is our goal. “For I am the Lord your God. Be holy because I am holy.” (Lev. 11:44). Holiness makes us Godlike and capable of enjoying His friendship (John 15:15). This intimate union is severed by mortal sin, and we become subjected to the devil and his angels. “God has forsaken him; pursue and seize him, for there is no one to rescue him” (Ps. 70:11).

The Catholic Faith teaches that the only real evil on earth is sin because it alone alienates us from God. No matter how much we might suffer from physical evils, they cannot truly hurt us because they cannot destroy the Divine life of the soul that is holiness. In contrasting the work of the Church with that of the world, Cardinal Newman brought this truth home in one of the most celebrated and moving passages in all of literature:

“The Church aims, not at making a show, but a doing a work. She regards this world, and all that is in it, as a mere shadow, as dust and ashes, compared with the value of one single soul. She holds that, unless she can, in her own way, do good to souls, it is no use her doing anything; she holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, so far as temporal afflication goes, than that one souls I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing without excuse. She considers the action of the soul simply incommensurate, viewed in their respective spheres; she would rather save the soul of one single wild bandit of Calabria, or whining beggar of Palerm4 than draw a hundred lines of railroad through the length and breadth of Italy, or carry out a sanitary reform, in its fullest details, in every city of Sicily, except so far as these great national works tended to some spiritual good beyond them.” (Cited in Charles Frederick Harrold, A Newman Treasury [New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1943 (1975)], pp. 249-50.)

The rampant worldliness, heresy, schism - the Modernist crisis in the Church in general - is a crisis of prayer because Modernists do not pray to the transcendent Triune God but to one who is immanent in man. Put bluntly, Modernists pray to man himself. For ex-ample, Eugene Kennedy denounces the traditional definition of prayer as “old and inadequate,” and gives a modern, man-centered view:

“Prayer, or any experience that deserves the name, matches the human condition. It is something peculiarly human, the kind of thing that a man does when he is truly maturing . . . In a profound way, prayer is what a man does when he is in touch with himself and the world around him; and he does it whether he knows it or not. Essentially, prayer is much closer to the activities man inevitably engages in as he becomes aware of and uses his powers than it is to the awkward negation of self with which it was frequently associated in the past.” (The Return to Man, p. 84. Copyright 1973 by Doubleday and Co., Inc.)

The title of Kennedy’s book says it all; and the title of the chapter on prayer is apropos, “The Return to Man in Prayer:” He calls for a return to man in general, and a return to man in prayer in particular, because as a Modernist he believes that God is unknowable. Kennedy reduces God to a symbol which serves to inculate feelings and emotions, the heart of religion. As is true with all Modernists, Kennedy echoes the words of Schleiermacher, one of the founding fathers of Modernism:

“Religion remained with me when God and immortality vanished before my doubting eyes.”

Begin a rationaistic religion that ex-cludes all spiritual realities, Modernism precludes, moreover, prayer in unity of faith and communion because there is no unity - no unity of government, doctrine, or worship. Thus an appeal to, or exercise of, the teaching and governing authority of the Church means nothing to Modernists like Kennedy because they believe the Church is the product of evolutionary forces and is subject to these processes. Each person must therefore follow his own feelings and experiences in matters of religion. Kennedy observes with pleasure that this has been the state of affairs since Vatican II:

Nothing reflects the truth about the broad gauge nature of the Catholic Church better than its prayer life . Now that the public prayers of the Church are spoken in contemporary tongues, people have expressed not only their varied enthusiasms or hopes, but their equally varied conceptions of the nature of God, the Church, and also the requisites of moral behavior. This still developing vernacular prayer life of the Church reflects an almost staggering diversity in belief and attitude within the institutional Church. The myth of orthodoxy across the continents and the ages can no longer be sustained” (ibid., p. 93).

By maintaining that God is nothing but our subjective, relative experience of Him, the Modernists are worshipping an idol - experience - and are not better that the pagans, “who in wickedness hold back the truth of God” (Rom. 1:18).

Rather than reduce God to experience, we should let Him conform us to the image of His Son (Rom. 8:29). So conformed, our minds are transformed and we “discern what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” (Rom. 12:2) And when we know God’s will and do it, then we are glorifying Him because we are as we should be.

This is our objective in prayer.