Essential Prayers and Catholic Devotions

My grandmother once told me of an Italian lady who could not pray without her prayerbook. She just did not know what words to use and did not feel that her own would do. Thankfully, the modern Roman Catholic church is not like that anymore: true religion is no longer submerged beneath a mass of ritual and empty words. Perhaps I was lucky to have been brought up an evangelical: never dependent on a prayerbook and always knowing that God is there to hear my words, that he does not care about how nice they sound but cares more about my thoughts and feelings. God wants us to love him as our father and to speak to him as we do our own natural fathers; why else did Jesus teach us to call God Our Father?

So we know how to pray, but How often? The answer to that is bound up in the question, What is prayer?

Becoming Christian is about giving your life over to God, it is knowing that God suffuses and infuses every part of your life. So how do you do this without committing your every action to God?

On Mt Kilimanjaro, my friends and I were approaching the most difficult part of the climb, when one of them said to me in encouragement, "At times like this, I find it good to pray." I've heard this before from him and from others, but never really know how to respond without sounding self-righteous or arrogant. "Don't you pray normally anyway? What do you mean 'at times like this'?"

St Paul tells us to "pray without ceasing", so clearly prayer is not just for church or for meal times.
If you see a beggar on the streetside, give him some of your sandwich but also remember to pray for him.
If an ambulance or fire engine passes you with its sirens wailing, pray for the people whose aid they are going to, but pray also for the paramedics and the firemen, that God will bless them and their work to his greater glory.
Pray for any downcast or grim faces you see on the street: just say "Lord God, bless him/her," and that is enough.
Walk into the supermarket and realise that the girl working at the checkout needs your prayer, too.
When you go to work, pray for your boss and for your fellow workers.
If you read a book that uplifts you and inspires you, pray and thank God for the work of the author.
And don't forget to pray for your enemies.

I think prayer at its most primitive level is silent communion with God, and in private personal devotion nothing more is required. Remember that God came to Elijah not in wind, or fire, or earthquake, but in the quietest of whispers.

But in all the ages of man, God's people have also made vocal prayer. This is because prayer is not always only God-ward but to Man-ward as well. God himself sometimes causes his servants to "speak in tongues", causing his worshippers to spontaneously cry out in ecstatic utterances. This is what the Bible calls glossolalia and its purpose is to teach and to convert. The other reason Christians pray out loud (which is more relevant to our discussion here), is that God encourages us to pray together as the Body of Christ.

At Holy Communion, the priest says, "We are the Body of Christ: in the one Spirit, we were all baptised into one body." What does he mean by We? It is an error to think that he means only those people present in the congregation. No, he means We the Church. And this Church is even wider than the community present here on earth. For there are two parts to the Church: the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. The Church Militant are those of the faithful still here, fighting the forces of Satan. The Church Triumphant are those who have passed on to receive their final reward in heaven. So when we pray as they body of Christ, we pray as one with every Christian now living, every Christian who has ever lived, and every Christian who will ever live. We are the Body of Christ.

Roman Catholics like to define catholic to mean all those Christians in communion with the Bishop of Rome. I think the best definition of catholic is that given by St Vincent de Lerins in the 5th century AD: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est, "that which has been believed in all times, in all places, by all." When I say "The Catholic Church", I mean "The Universal Church", as defined by St Vincent. So I say I am catholic without meaning Roman Catholic, and that those prayers are catholic which have been prayed by the Body of Christ since the earliest times.

So comes our strongest argument for the use of set prayers. What is wrong with extemporaneous prayer? Nothing, but do not say that God hates prayers read from pieces of paper, because set prayers allow his church to pray together. Jesus took regular part in the worship of the synagogues and never complained of it, despite the fact that even in his day their worship was extremely ritualistic. When Jesus blessed the bread and the wine at the Last Supper, what words did he use? We know precisely what words he used, because as a Jew he would have used the same words as are today used by every Orthodox Jew when blessing bread and wine: Baruch ata adonai, eloheynu, melech ha-olam... "Blessed are you, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe..." And if Jesus was not afraid to use a set form of words, why should we be? The crux of the matter is that we should use the words and mean them.

The saints are those Christians who have gone before us. They were mortal just as we are and they experienced much the same trials as we now face. Small wonder then that so much of what they wrote is relevant to us today. Use their words as recorded for us by history, or modify them to suit your personal situation. But when you pray them, make it your own prayer that speaks to God from the depth of your heart. Remember that the words are merely a channel for your thoughts and emotions which are the true prayer that reaches the Throne of Grace.

© 1998 Gavin Koh