Characteristics of Prayer

Characteristics of Prayer

"Leaving prayer aside, the whole spiritual edifice collapses and a pile of ruins remains, a fine castle but a dilapidated one" (UPS II, 12).  The inescapable necessity of prayer must urge us on to find out what are its principal characteristics, so as to live it authentically and not fall short in this essential commitment in the life of everyone, and in particular in the life of every consecrated person.

Many characteristics are obvious, but the Word of God suggests the essentials without which prayer can hardly exist. St. Luke speaks about the disciples gathered in the Cenacle while awaiting the coming of the Spirit. He says that "together they devoted themselves to constant prayer. There were some women in their company and Mary, the Mother of Jesus" (Acts 1,14). They devoted themselves to constant prayer and they were together. These are two essential characteristics if our prayer is to be successful: "unanimity" and "perseverance."

UNANIMITY: Prayer is unanimous when all those praying are in agreement on asking essential things - in fact the same things. Can we in the Institute achieve that sort of unanimity?

I think so.

We must first of all pray for greater holiness - what good is our consecration if it does not lead in that direction?

Next we must pray for more vocations and for the energy to look for them. What good is our consecration if our numbers are going down? Our holiness in the Institute is a community holiness, a family holiness, not something individual only. It is also individual but increases when more people are brought in to make their contribution of prayer and sacrifice. Our prayer benefits them, their prayer benefits us.

Next we should pray for all Pauline Family members. For this purpose the monthly calendar with the names of our deceased is very useful. Useful also is information on what is happening in other parts of the Family and what are the directives of the Superior General - these have been published regularly for several years.

Next we have the common intentions, mostly for the sick, published each month. Sickness is a great unifier and we seem to have no shortage of it, so we pray for each other, those listed and those I either don't know about or who have asked not to be listed. In this same connection come prayers for your own family members.

The power of our prayer in this sense does not lie in our being physically together (rather rare in our case) but in being in agreement on the principal things to ask for. It does not lie so much in repeating the same formulae (these are important because they are compendium of spiritual experiences, but we have to make them ours) but in the fact of agreeing to make the same request.

"Again, I tell you, if two of you join your voices on earth to pray for anything whatever, it shall be granted to you by my father in heaven. Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am in their midst"(Mt. 18: 19-20).

Unanimity is far deeper than uniformity. Uniformity means saying the same things together, giving the same responses, reciting the same prayers. On the other hand, unanimity requires that deep, heartfelt union, which causes the request made by one member of the Institute to become everybody's request. And what one member of the Institute suffers becomes the common suffering. The Institute thus becomes (or can become) "one heart and one soul" in prayer.

If the Institute practices only uniformity in prayer it: runs the risk of becoming fossilized as the members live largely by rote. In fact we cannot limit ourselves to reciting the basic prayers but should vary them by perhaps omitting some but pondering on what might be the deeper meaning of others. The prayers are the scaffolding setting us off from all other groups in the Church but we have to build our own personal "castle" within that scaffolding! This is an excellent and practical meditation and we should continue as long as the Master inspires us. Each of us has personal graces and we are entitled to his assistance when we ask how better could we understand the Institute and the Pauline Family and how better - perhaps - could we serve both.

PERSEVERANCE: Perhaps we can best understand the real meaning of the perseverance the Master invites us to have, if we say what perseverance is NOT. It is not a pagan perseverance, the multiplication of words for fear that God will not hear, that He is distracted or is ignoring us. Such a perseverance, ironically, is founded on lack of trust in God and so misses the essential condition for entering into God's plans: faith (cf Mt. 6,7).

It is not the perseverance of the priests of Baal who spent the morning leaping about the altar calling down fire from their God on the victim being offered (1 Kings, 18,25). They were calling on a non-existent God and this is a risk we, too, can run when we invoke a "vending-machine" God or a very distant one. The God of Jesus is completely different. He is a merciful Father, continually bent over human beings and over their sufferings and needs and continually ready to forgive.

It is not even the perseverance of the inhabitants of the city of Bethulia who, besieged by the Syrians, were starving to death. Their perseverance set certain limits on God and Judith rebuked them, saying: "It is not for you to make the Lord, our God, give surety for His plans ... we wait for the salvation that comes from Him"(Judith 8, 12-17).

In a word, perseverance is a trust-filled waiting on God’s intervention, on His freeing or consoling intervention, and so: * It resembles Elijah’s perseverance on Mt. Horeb. He does not whine to obtain rain (though there had been a three-year drought), but awaits with faith until the Lord manifests his will (1 Kings 18: 41-46).

* It is above all the sublime and inimitable perseverance of Jesus who, in the Garden of Gethsemane repeated "the selfsame words" (Mt.26,44), so that these words would effectively enter his life and make him capable not just of "doing" the will of God, but of "becoming" and "being" the will of God.

~Concord July 2015