The fourth part of a four-part series on building a life of prayer by by Father Francis Martin, S.S.D.
Putting Prayer into Practice
How does this begin? It begins by turning from our sins and turning to God. The Lord calls us, “leave off your sin, come to get to know me, because I think thoughts of peace and I’m ready to bless you in a way that goes beyond anything you can imagine. But you must come, you must learn to relate to me, to submit to me, to give your life to me and learn what it is to serve me. It is for this that I made you,” says the Lord. Prayer then is constant, conscious interaction with Jesus Christ. It is to know that you are touched by the Lord. Prayer is a gift. It is a work of the Holy Spirit in us and it should be the foundation for our whole life. This means that we have to set aside time every day to do nothing but be with the Lord.
People tell me, “well, I pray when I drive.” Or, “well, I think of God a lot; I say little prayers all day.” This is all very good, but imagine, you who are married, what it would mean if you said, “well, I talk to my husband every once in a while, I say goodbye when he leaves, hello when he comes back”—but you never really sit down and talk. Well, you know you really would not be communicating, would you? Prayer is communication with God and it has to be the backbone of our whole life—a living knowledge of the Lord. Prayer is not something that is reserved for just a few people. It’s our heritage. Now, to be serious about prayer means we have to start by setting aside time and finding a place to pray.
The first thing we have to do is find a time. That’s usually the rub—time. We say, “but I’m so busy.” Doing what? Our society has conspired to steal from us the most precious thing in our life. The best time to pray is in the morning. So the secret to a good prayer life is to go to bed on time. Now that sounds pretty elementary, but it is really true. I can remember when I was in Jerusalem and very, very busy, and I began to notice I was cutting back on my prayer time, and I said, “well this has got to stop.” So I tried to get away from all of those late meetings by saying things like “I’ve got a cold, I’ve got to go home.” Everyone would say, “no, no, just wait a bit and we’ll be finished soon.” Finally, I began to say, “look I’ve got to go home, so I can get up, so I can pray,” and then everyone replied, “oh, no problem, just leave.” Then I thought, well why didn’t I just tell the truth in the first place? Why didn’t I just tell everybody, “look that’s enough, I’ve got to go home because I’ve got to get up and pray?”
Morning is the best time for prayer, before we get into the responsibilities of our day. If it is possible, pray in the morning, but if it isn’t look for another time, but be regular about it. I can tell you the worse time to pray—just before you go to bed. Some people say, “I pray just as I’m going off to sleep.” Well, you don’t pray as you’re going off to sleep—you go off to sleep, right? It’s amazing, isn’t it, how we can fool ourselves!
So you’ve got to find the time, and the place to pray. Now you’re going to need support even for that. So it’s good to tell your wife, or your husband, or your friends, “I’m going to pray every day from x o’clock to x o’clock,” and then give them permission to ask if you follow through. You have to promise them ahead of time that you won’t get mad at them when they ask you.
Now when you start to pray you start with a reasonable amount of time. Something you can really handle. It’s like learning how to jog. If tomorrow you say, “I’m going to get into shape and jog,” then go out and jog eight miles. Well, you might drop of a heart attack before you finish, but if you start that way, you’ll probably never jog again. So if you say, “I’m going to pray an hour and a half every day,” you just won’t do it. Oh, you might do it tomorrow if it’s a day off, but come Monday you won’t. It’s better to start off with 15 or 20 minutes of prayer and learn to be hungry for God, and learn from God the wisdom to order your life. I know some men who work in high-pressure corporate jobs and many of them thought they could never take the time to pray every day. But they began with 15 or 20 minutes of prayer. Over time, many of these men now pray an hour a day. They do all of the work they used to do, in fact they do it better. They even have time to evangelize other men, and they’ve learned wisdom from the Lord.
As far as what we do in prayer, it is essential that we have conscious interaction with Jesus Christ. Some people say, “well, I pray by reading the breviary,” or “I say the rosary.” This is marvelous, but does it involve conscious interaction with the Lord? This has got to be the foundation of real prayer. When it is there, then the breviary and the rosary, and, of course, the Mass, can all be moments of real prayer. But if we do these things without living conscious faith, then what is it—is it really prayer, being with the Lord, or just a ritual we perform each day? The same goes with reading the Bible when we pray. This is great, there is a time for this when we pray, but we just don’t read all of the time while we pray. If your best friend was standing before you and wanted to talk, would you say, “wait I just got a letter from you let me read it, I’ll talk to you later.” You don’t do that! But you see how confused our thinking can be as we approach prayer—that we really just don’t believe that God truly wants to communicate with us.
Father Francis Martin lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He is Professor of Biblical Studies at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.
(c) The California Mission