Alternative Approaches To Prayer

   

All loving relationships evolve and are expressed differently over time. A person may pray the same way for 20 years and sustain a loving and vital relationship with God but that vitality will only remain if he or she is not fearful of trying other approaches.

• There might come a time when we hear the invitation in our hearts to move from a verbal prayer to a more meditative prayer, one that allows us to use our imagination, our memory and our desires.   This move is not uncommon and need not be resisted.
• At some point we may hear the invitation to listen more in our prayer and to intercede less.  A recent Sunday’s Post Communion Prayer asked the Father: that faithfully listening to your Only Begotten Son we may be your children in name and in truth.   We need to have elements of listening in our prayer – our activity does not initiate the love God holds us in.  We have to get better at surrendering into his existing love for us.   In fact ‘surrendering’ into God’s love is a wonderful description of relaxed listening prayer. 
• Over time we may well hear another invitation being suggested to us in our hearts:  that we pray the scriptures more - the Word of God.  Such a move has a long history among Christians and is often called Lectio Divina.  Those who pray this way are aware of three distinct steps: (1) repeated reading and engagement with the word and images of the text; (2) a meditation on an aspect of or a small section of passage read and finally, (3) raising a personal prayer to God using the words, images and sentiments of the passage.  These three steps can then all be repeated the next time we pray.  This is a good approach when we opt to pray the Sunday readings prior to the Sunday they will be proclaimed.
• We may hear the invitation to pray the Liturgy of the Hours – the psalms and canticles used in morning prayer and evening prayer by many in the church.  We in our parish community offered Evening Prayer of the church three times during Advent and we will do so again in Lent.  The beauty of this prayer is that it uses the poetry of the Old Testament, it unites us to the whole church and it either verbal or meditative depending on how we are feeling at the time we pray.

Because prayer is about knowing the love of God, we can consider how we might change our prayer in the hope of growing in that relationship.

Fr. Neville O'Donohue, S.M., Pastor