Do you have to pray all the time?

I remember asking that question of some Seminarians when I first started taking steps to enter the Seminary and they paused, looked at each other and said… "Well, yes you do pray a lot and in many different ways." I realise now that they were probably giving me the answer that they thought I wanted to hear or what they felt they should say.

In fact, as we prepared for priesthood, we discussed a lot more about the nature of prayer and the importance of prayer and yet it is about the quality of prayer, not the quantity or even the length!

Prayer life is important in forming and focusing us. All too often people see prayer in terms of what they can get out of it. Prayer is, however, primarily about speaking with God, giving worship to God and being aware of God and ourselves. But this need not be something formal that takes up twelve hours of the day of anything like that. It can become an important, natural and balanced part of one’s day.

From my time in the Seminary, I found it became easier to speak prayers in different situations, and it became easier to speak about Jesus and subjects of faith without feeling self-conscious or feel like I was speaking like some religious fanatic.

I also learnt that there are many different forms of prayer and not all types of prayer suit all people. You have to find the right balance of prayer that most expresses who you are and what you are doing. For example, there are two basic types of prayer: Private and Public. Both types are important. Private prayer is about the individual or a small group of people and God. Public prayer is about the community and God. To become an integrated and balanced person one would expect there to be elements of both.

Public prayer includes praying the Prayer of the Church or the Liturgy of the Hours (also known as the Divine Office). This is the official way the church keeps the hours of the day holy. It consists of Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer and Night Prayer. It also features other prayers including Prayer During the Day and the Office of Readings. The major element of this official prayer is the four-week cycle of praying the psalms from the bible. This is considered public prayer because it is something the whole Church prays (lay, religious and clerics) and even if it is prayed alone, it is being done in communion with the whole church throughout the world.

The ultimate Public prayer is the Eucharist, (the Mass), which is the summit and source of the Church’s life. Again, although there is space for silent prayer in the liturgy, it is primarily a public and official action of the Church (involving the community of faith) and not a mere private devotion. Other Public Worship includes, Reconciliation, Anointing, The Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and First Communion;

To complete the balance, it is still essential to foster a private prayer life. This is nurturing one’s own relationship with God. There are different forms of private prayer:

Sometimes you hear people say "my whole life is a prayer, I don’t need to set aside special time to pray." Well, unless one is a contemplative who does all things conscious of the presence of God, it would probably be best to say that we need to set aside specific time for prayer.

One of the primary "jobs" of a priest, if you like to put it that way, is to pray and to reflect on the Scriptures. This can be a privilege and a struggle. When I entered the Seminary to begin studying, I thought to myself, "since it’s my job to pray, I will have plenty of time to do that." However, I quickly discovered that like every other job, the busy-ness of "urgent things" could easily mean that (if I am not careful) I could fall into the trap of not setting aside the essential time for meditation and prayer.

It is a trap, to let busyness prevent prayer, since we end up being busy but more and more we end up drawing from an "empty well" if we are not re-connecting with the source of our vocation: God!

Another trap is that our job include leading prayer services, and liturgies, including Mass, Anointing, Prayer of the Church. In a real sense we are praying when we engage in these things. However, we are also serving when we do this, and we still need to put aside time that is for no other reason than to worship God and recharge our own Spiritual batteries, times that are not "work related." Same with reading the Bible. We have to read the scriptures and study commentaries to prepare our homilies, and this needs to be a prayerful activity that can also be very spiritually nourishing. But we also need to put aside time to read the Scriptures not with our next speech in mind but simply for the sake of taking in God’s word. In other words, we need to have time for prayer and reading that is not simply for a pragmatic reason.

Finally, prayer is not the result of our human effort. Without God’s grace, our attempts to pray would be ineffective. So, we can’t make ourselves pray more or better. All we can do is put aside the space and time (even if it’s a few minutes a day) and ask God to draw us into prayer in this time. Prayer is not a feeling or a thing we do to get a desired result, it is time for God. This is a lifelong challenge and its worth continuing to explore with a Spiritual Director that each priest should have. This is a person we meet with who is not a counselor, but is someone we speak with about our prayer life and any challenges with it.

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