Day 328: HOW WE Pray (INTRO TO PART 4)

• It’s Day 328!!

• Welcome Sr. Miriam James Heidland!!

• Sr. Miriam is so calm and Fr. Mike talks so fast

• Sr. Miriam has this sense of joyful peace about her

• Let’s listen to Sr. Miriam tell her story…

• She is a member of the Society of Our Lady of the most Holy Trinity…SOLT

• She does a lot of work in healing retreats with priests and religious sisters

• Sr. Miriam had to prepare a class on Mystagogy and had to read a lot of the Catechism

• She found herself at her desk reading the Catechism and weeping

• She realized it was so beautiful

• Archbishop Fulton Sheen said, “Very few people leave the Church because of what the Church teaches but what they think the Church teaches.”

• Our Faith makes sense and is so beautiful

• The Lord is not asking us to deny our intellect or to deny the deeper recesses of our heart

• God is bringing us into communion

• That is what prayer is about

• In so many ways, through prayer, our hearts become more and more like Jesus

• Living according to His commands, yes

• We are cooperating with knowing His heart

• For those of us who are still challenged more than we are consoled, there is a word of hope here

• You are not done if you still struggle

• The life of grace is yours

• We move forward by developing and deepening this relationship with God

• Let’s pray!!

Prayer by Fr. Mike: “Father in Heaven, we give you praise and thanks. In the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, we ask you to please receive our thanks, receive our praise this day. I thank you for the community who have been pressing play. I thank you for all of us who have been journeying through these first three Pillars of The Catechism, all the way to this day, to the beginning of this Fourth Pillar, this last installment, essentially, of your teaching, your self revelation to the world. We ask that you please, on this day, remind us that you desire not merely that we know more, but that we love more. Not merely that we have more information, but that we allow you, by your grace and by our cooperation, to have transformation in you. Help us to be more and more like you. Lord God, meet us in our frustrations, meet us in the dryness of prayer, meet us in the battle of prayer, and meet us in this moment as we open our hearts to you. Fill those hearts with the fire of your love, and help us to love you and to love our neighbor better. Help us to be prayers because, Lord God, we do not know how to pray as we ought. So send your Holy Spirit now and always. We pray this in the mighty name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen”

• So what can we expect from PILLAR 4: HOW WE PRAY?

• What are some of the main themes/takeaways?

• This is such a beautiful revelation of the history of prayer and the rich culture of prayer that we have

• In today’s contemporary society, there are all these ways to pray that are outside of our Faith tradition

• We as Catholics do not even know our own tradition of prayer

• In the Old Testament in Genesis when God comes in search of Adam and Eve we see that call and response from the very beginning

• We see the human heart at prayer

• This is not about making a to-do list of prayer

• It is a response to the relationship we have with God

• Our hearts are meant to live in relationship

• Prayer is always a response to God’s initiative

• Man’s creation is a response to God’s goodness

• Our creation is a response to God’s own blessed life

• That is why God calls out

• God is always the initiator of the gift

• We as the Bride are responding to the gift of the Bridegroom

• Any desire that we have to pray comes from God

• Fr. Mark Toups says, “We don’t have to do the heavy lifting. Everything we have is a gift.”

• That can terrify us because we are reminded that we are so little and that we are not in control

• BUT…

• It is beautiful because that means every aspect of my life is under the sovereign Lordship of our Lord, Jesus Christ

• He comes to reveal Himself at all times

• That is beautiful

• So if God is the initiator and all our prayer is always a response, how does that change how we approach prayer?

• God is doing the heavy lifting, we don’t have to do that

• It gives us great comfort that this is not all up to me

• Many times we do feel that it is all up to us

• We are not manifesting to the universe and some random intention that we hope the universe hears and responds

• BUT…

• We are speaking to a REAL DIVINE PERSON

• We are speaking to Jesus

• We are speaking to the Triune God who makes a covenant with us and dwells within us

• When St. Paul says to pray without ceasing, he is talking about the wine cellar in The Song of Songs

• He is talking about the constant communion of the Covenant that God makes with us that we can’t make with ourselves

• Because God gives that to us and He brings us into His own divide life, that means I am never alone

• That means for all the experiences we have had of abandonment or rejection or fear or shame or being overwhelmed, God is who He says He is

• The more I can come into agreement with that and the truth I am learning more about God, then I can rest more deeply and the truth of my being comes alive

• THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING!!

• Let’s listen to Fr. Mike talk about Mike Gormley aka Gomer…

• “As Catholics, we were taught to say our prayers and not how to pray.”

• The way we pray is always by living in relationship with God

• God is always instigating

• We always have the opportunity to respond

• If God is always initiating, then we never have to fight for His attention

• St. Thérèse of Lisieux says in Paragraph 2558, “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”

• She looks at the Father and He is already gazing at her

• He is already the one who is moving

• That is the beautiful relationship between us as children of a good Father

• If there is somebody really real on the other end of my conversation who is responding to me, that is a very different dynamic

• We have to grow from just saying our prayers to becoming men and women of prayer

• That is the integration that Jesus is calling us to

• When we look at how Jesus lives, He is teaching us how to live

• Prayer with His Father is at the heart of His life

• He lives from HIs relationship

• He doesn’t get His identity from His mission

• From that relationship and intimacy comes the mission

• He is teaching us how to be human

• RIM is the acronym

• R = Relationship

• I = Identity

• M = Mission

• A lot of times when we come before the Lord, we base our identity off of our mission

• Our mission ends up giving us our identity

• What happens when the mission leaves?

• So we are living this backwards

• We are called to relationship as adopted sons and daughters of the Father

• That gives us our identity

• THEN we go on mission

• The mission can change

• BUT…

• The relationship is always the source of our identity

• That is one of the themes we will hear again and again in this Pillar

• Scripture is replete with heart language

• Jesus speaks to us about the heart

• We are not talking about sentimentality or what we feel strongly

• When we talk about the heart, we are talking about the CORE

• What happens in our heart matters

• What doesn’t happen in our heart matters

• Paragraph 2563 says, “The heart is the dwelling-place where I am, where I live; according to the Semitic or Biblical expression, the heart is the place ‘to which I withdraw.’ THe heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others; only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully. The heart is the place of decision, deeper than our psychic drives. It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death. It is the place of encounter, because as image of God we live in relation: it is the place of covenant.”

• The Pillar on Prayer is going to unfold from there 

• Jesus says, “From the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks.”

• Jesus says, “Wherever your treasure is, there your heart is.”

• What is going on within that sacred place, our core, is so important

• How tempting is it to just SAY our prayers

• With how busy our lives are, the temptation is to just stay on the surface as opposed to actually withdraw to the heart

• As Catholics, we have all sorts of different tools and devotions to pray

• Sometimes we can rely overly on the tools as opposed to allowing the tool to get to our heart

• Let’s listen to Fr. Mike talk about his friend with the prayer cards…

• If prayer cards help you get deep to the heart of prayer, that is a good thing

• What happens if we put the prayer card down and just talk to the Lord?

• The Psalms can be what our heart wanted to say

• Sometimes the Psalms can be just surface prayer

• The Catechism talks about vocal prayer, meditative prayer, and contemplative prayer

• Some of us Catholics were taught to pray the Rosary

• The vocal prayer of the Rosary is the high point

• The heart of the Rosary is to lead us into union with Jesus, to become one in His mysteries

• Are we using anything in our lives, whatever it is, to make sure that we don’t have to go deeper?

• Because many times the things that we do not want to talk about are the very things that Jesus wants to talk to us about

• The Church teaches us that there are many types of prayer

• Will we ever use any of these forms of prayer as a way to keep God at a distance?

• OR…

• Will we let them be what they are meant to be, to give God access to our hearts?

• Why does the Catechism devote an entire pillar to prayer?

• BECAUSE IT IS EVERYTHING!!

• It is our relationship with Jesus

• It is not just what we do

• IT IS WHO WE ARE!!

• It is helping us grow in union with Jesus

• If that is what Christianity is about, the Holy Spirit configuring Christ in me, and I look at how Jesus prays, and that is what Jesus does, and that is what I want to do as well

• People say we should read PILLAR 4: HOW WE PRAY first and then from that lens, read the rest of The Catechism

• Because that is going to help us understand why does the Church what it does on the Catechism

• Because it is going to frame everything in that relationship with the Lord

• Love is challenging

• When we read the Catechism, we should always notice in our hearts what captivates us and what challenges us because it is showing us different places of our heart

• Love, which is to be a disciple, is purifying and challenging

• We need to have the anchor of trust in God when we don’t understand what we are reading and that is why we need to know how to pray

• So after this pillar, listen to the whole thing again

• Let’s listen to Fr. Mike talk about RCIA…

• If we are just learning facts about God, but not living this relationship through prayer, then it rings hollow and the heart is missing

• Jesus doesn’t go into isolation to pray, He goes into solitude

• All of us need solitude with the Lord, no matter what we are doing in life

• Because that is when Jesus reminds us of who we are

• Jesus refreshes that grace of our Covenant and brings us into deeper union

• In our culture right now, we are lacking in both solitude and connection

• It is rare that we are actually alone with the alone

• It is rare that we are in real connection with others

• We are in this weird middle place where we are constantly being distracted but not connected

• St. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

• All of us experience the restlessness of our hearts because we often are looking for something to satisfy us other than God

• Or it could be because we are afraid

• Are we afraid to spend fifteen minutes by ourselves?

• We all struggle with obstacles to prayer

• Many of us labor under the illusion that prayer is not really for us or that holiness is not for us

• Most people do not know the universal call to holiness 

• Most people do not know that the Covenant that God made with us in our Baptism marks us forever as children and sets us in a relationship

• Many of us doubt that God wants that relationship with us

• Many of us doubt that God wants time with us

• Let’s listen to Fr. Mike talk about Fr. Thomas Dube…

• If we are going to be the person that God wants us to be, then we have to pray at some point regularly

• What are some other obstacles?

• Not knowing how to pray

• There can be areas of shame thinking that God won’t love us 

• We often find other things to do besides pray

• We sometimes don’t know if we want to get that close to the Lord because we feel ashamed

• These excuses are manifestations of a deeper reality

• So what do we do with that shame?

• Practically, we can name what is happening in our heart and bring it to the objective truth

• We are bringing our subjective experience into the objective reality of God

• Maybe we experience a deep unworthiness or a deep inferiority and we might not know where that comes from 

• “Lord, I feel like I’m not even worth praying. You wouldn’t listen to me.”

• Even those words tell us deep stories about ourselves

• But God can reveal me to myself so start taking those things out and letting God speak to them

• There is nothing that replaces a good, holy, sacramental confession 

• “The Lord forgave me for this and so I can, with the Lord, go to the deeper places of pain.”

• Mr. Rogers said, “If it’s mentionable, it is manageable.”

• So much of our life is not mentioned when we can’t name what it is

• There is something about naming how God creates

• There is something about naming what we are afraid of

• There is something about naming the pain in our life

• Naming it allows it to take a lot of the darkness out of it and allows the Lord to come in with His Light

• The Lord is not surprised

• The Lord is not embarrassed of it

• The Lord is not afraid of us

• Anything we are going to find out these days as we walk through prayer is that Jesus already knows that

• Jesus is already with us

• Let’s listen to Fr. Mike talk about Confession and encouraging his students…

• In Confession, we are giving God access to something He doesn’t have, the depths of our heart

• God is the one who initiates

• He knows our heart already

• He wants our heart

• Let’s listen to Fr. Mike talk about going to Israel and renewing vows at Cana…

• If we can live through the shame and not hide the shame, that is part of how our prayer has to be when we bring it to the Lord in Confession

• Now we will have a new way to pray because we are not deceived into thinking that we have to be perfect

• Marriage is the icon of how God loves us

• “I am yours and you are mine forever.”

• This is the battle of prayer

• The Lord is still faithful

• The Lord still invites our gaze

• The Lord never averts His gaze from us

• The Lord is there over and over and over again

• All the masters of prayer talk about coming to the end of our own strength

• This is the stuff of real human life

• This is what we ache for

• We ache in our epic failures

• That someone would still love us and believe in us 

• All of us want to love heroically and want to be heroically loved

• This is what PILLAR 4: HOW WE PRAY is all about

• That is Salvation history

• That is the whole Gospel summed up in our own hearts

• The maturity starts when we come to the end of our own strength

• The Church has never condescended in Her teaching in the Catechism

• We are made for the heights and this is where we are called

• The Church is not pulling any punches

• We might not even realize the heights that God is calling us and the depths of relationship that God is calling us to

• The Catechism is here to make it clear

• Prayer is more and more understood the more and more God reveals Himself

• “In the fullness of time, Jesus reveals what prayer can be because we get to see Him in His prayer.”

• So what are some of the things that Jesus teaches us when He is praying?

• Jesus is teaching us about what it means to be the beloved child of God

• Jesus is, at all times, the same person because of His identity of who He is

• Jesus is the same when they’re healing Him

• Jesus is the same when they want to make him king

• Jesus is the same when they are crucifying Him, spitting on Him, and when His own disciples fail Him

• HE IS THE SAME PERSON!!

• Jesus is teaching us what it really tangibly looks like to be fully human

• Because Jesus is the Man who is fully alive

• Jesus is teaching us what it means to live in continual relationship with the Father

• Humanity has never seen that before

• We have never seen that revelation

• Christ never wastes His words

• He taught us the OUR FATHER

• Jesus teaches us the essentials of this relationship 

• So it is only from there that He says, “Go out and do what I have done. Love one another as I have loved you.”

• How do we do that?

• We do this first by allowing ourselves to be loved by Him

• This does not end

• This is continually refined

• We are taking this excellence of love and continuing to grow and that goes into Eternal Life with Him

• We see in Christ the literal incarnation of the beloved son, the beloved daughter of God

• Jesus is something we are looking up to

• He gives us the grace to live, to forgive, to love, to suffer, to live in joy, and to live in truth and that is where you see the freedom

• To be free to love Jesus the way that He loves…

• To be that free where we are not caught up in our own ego or our own self-defense mechanisms or the places where we have to make sure everybody knows we are right because we are important…

• Jesus is so lovely, how could we resist Him?

• How much of our lives are spent with image management of a situation?

• Many people feel their prayer life is very empty, shallow, and dry

• Part of it is, “I’m upset with the Lord, but I am not talking to Him about it.”

• “I’m going through a struggle, and I’m not going to give Him access to it.”

• “I’m experiencing some kind of battle, but I am not going to invite Him into it.”

• OF COURSE THEIR PRAYER IS DRY AND SHALLOW!!

• We have this whole world that we are not letting God have access to as opposed to what God has revealed to us

• Jesus is always a beloved Son on top of the world

• At His worst moment, He shows us what it is to be a beloved child of the Father when everyone has left you and when all of your hopes and dreams have fallen, when everyone has betrayed you

• He shows us what it is to be a beloved child of the Father when everyone loves you 

• HE IS JUST THE SAME!!

• Love is a high standard

• Jesus is teaching us as the Bridegroom as He gives His life on the Cross for the Bride

• This is a Man of Joy who says, “It is worth it.”

• He is not a helpless victim

• He is giving Himself as a Man, as the Bridegroom to restore the Church as the new Adam

• IT IS WORTH IT!!

• That kind of love can’t help but change us

• So we start again

• Venerable Bruno Lanteri said, “If I should fall a thousand times a day, a thousand times a day I will begin again. I will trust in the Lord’s mercy and begin again.”

• NUNC COEPI!!

• “Now I begin”

• God’s mercies are without end and so here I am with my brokenness and shame when I run to the end of my own strength

• “Ok, Lord. Now I am just beginning. I pick it up again.”

• And let God pick you up again

• Give God permission to love you

• What section really speaks to Sr. Miriam’s heart in this pillar?

• The section on CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER

• Paragraph 2709 says, “What is contemplative prayer? St. Teresa answers: ‘Contemplative prayer [oración mental] in my opinion is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.’ Contemplative prayer seeks him ‘whom my soul loves.’ It is Jesus, and in him, the Father. We seek him, because to desire him is always the beginning of love, and we seek him in that pure faith which causes us to be born of him and to live in him. In this inner prayer we can still meditate, but our attention is fixed on the Lord himself.”

• Prayer is always a gift

• We can always go to Jesus and say, “Lord, just give me the gift of prayer. Holy Spirit, teach me how to pray every day.”

• It doesn’t matter because we don’t know what we don’t know

• In contemplative prayer, alone in quiet with the Lord, Jesus whispers secrets there that He doesn’t share with anybody else 

• There is a place that is reserved for just you and the Lord that is sacred

• The Lord delights in us and He speaks to us

• St. Teresa of Avila said, “If you are praying your vocal prayers and our readings and at some point if God brings you to a place of contemplative prayer, put the vocal prayer to the side and just receive it as a gift.”

• To desire God is the beginning of love

• “Pray as you can, not as you can’t.”

• “Seek him because to desire him is always the beginning of love.”

• Paragraph 2714 says, “Contemplative prayer is also the pre-eminently intense time of prayer. In it the Father strengthens our inner being with power through his Spirit ‘that Christ may dwell in [our] hearts through faith’ and we may be ‘grounded in love.’”

• The more we allow that truth and love of the Lord to come and root us and ground us, that is where everything else comes from in the core of our being

• Let’s listen to Sr. Miriam talk about her friend whose prayer life changed because of her newborn infant…

• The Lord is gracious in different seasons of our life

• Prayers of petition are efficacious 

• Contemplation doesn’t DO anything

• Contemplation is gazing at your baby

• Paragraph 2715 says, “Contemplation is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus. ‘I look at him and he looks at me’: this is what a certain peasant of Ars in the time of his holy curé used to say while praying before the tabernacle. This focus on Jesus is a renunciation of self. His gaze purifies our heart; the light of the countenance of Jesus illumines the eyes of our heart and teaches us to see everything in the light of his truth and his compassion for all men. Contemplation also turns its gaze on the mysteries of the life of Christ. Thus it learns the ‘interior knowledge of our Lord,’ the more to love him and follow him.”

• If my identity comes by this relationship, then this is the reason to be here and contemplate

• We all have things to do, but they do not flow from our very being

• We are inevitably going to suffer from burnout or try to drive our identity from that

• Jesus is teaching His disciples how to have our loves properly ordered, how to have our life ordered around the one thing that matters

• Who doesn't need to gaze upon the face of Jesus?

• So what’s Fr. Mike’s favorite section in this pillar?

• ARTICLE 2: THE BATTLE OF PRAYER

• First we have to know the heart of the Father

• Second we have to know that we can trust God with our shame and brokenness and trust that He loves us and wants to spend time with us

• Do we go to Mass because we have to, or because it matters to God that we go and worship Him as He deserves to be worshiped?

• Why would the infinite, all powerful, eternal God care whether my showing up and worshiping Him for an hour matter to Him?

• Because God says, “It actually matters when you show up.”

• Atheists make the argument that it doesn’t matter to God how you act

• God loves us enough that it DOES matter

• Paragraph 2725 says, “Prayer is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part. It always presupposes effort. The great figures of prayer of the Old Covenant before Christ, as well as the Mother of God, the saints, and he himself, all teach us this: prayer is a battle. Against whom? Against ourselves and against the wiles of the tempter who does all he can to turn man away from prayer, away from union with God. We pray as we live, because we live as we pray. If we do not want to act habitually according to the Spirit of Christ, neither can we pray habitually in his name. The ‘spiritual battle’ of the Christian’s new life is inseparable from the battle of prayer.”

• You are not doing something wrong if it is sometimes hard

• We are going to keep going 

• We sometimes misunderstand that if it’s hard it must mean we are doing something wrong

• Not necessarily

• Love is very purifying

• Love is calling us to a deeper excellence and deeper union

• People can get to a major struggle or they find a block in their heart and they want to stop praying

• Or they tried a different prayer method and it didn’t work

• The Lord wants us to keep seeking and keep going

• If we do not experience that dryness or distraction, our hearts cannot grow 🤯 🤯 🤯

• God wants us to have a heart that grows

• If I am just loving the gifts of prayer or the consolations of prayer, then I am just loving myself 🤯 🤯 🤯

• BUT…

• If God teaches me through these distractions and dryness, to continue to choose Him in the midst of desolation and realize He is doing something remarkable in my heart

• When it gets difficult, do we love God for what He gives us?

• Do we love the gifts?

• OR…

• Do we love the Giver?

• It is one thing to receive the gifts and be in gratitude of that and then to receive all that God gives us and not mistake the gifts for the Giver

• The Giver is most important

• If not, that is making an idol out of the gifts and treating God like a genie

• The Lord has so much more for us

• Sometimes our prayer can devolve into an attempt to manipulate God

• Sometimes our prayer can be superstitious where it can feel like a contractual exchange

• “My child is dying, so I will do the novena to whatever saint you tell me to.”

• BUT…

• The Lord always brings us back to the heart

• We have to be very careful and think about the images we have of God

• Because we are so little, we don’t always know what we need

• Those are the real parts of the human heart that the Lord reveals Himself in

• Jesus is not holding out on us

• WHY DO WE COMPLAIN OF NOT BEING HEARD?

• Paragraph 2735 says, “In the first place, we ought to be astounded by this fact: when we praise God or give him thanks for his benefits in general, we are not particularly concerned whether or not our prayer is acceptable to him. On the other hand, we demand to see the results of our petitions. What is the image of God that motivates our prayer: an instrument to be used? Or the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ?”

• 🤯 🤯 🤯

• Isn’t that convicting?

• We need to hear this in a time of peace so that we do not forget it in a time of distress

• What is your image of God?

• Is God the ATM or is God our Father who actually loves us?

• The author of the Catechism wrote PILLAR 4: HOW WE PRAY in Beirut while bombs were raining down on his home

• He was in the basement with a typewriter and a candle writings this section on prayer while his life was in danger for weeks on end

• Psalm 3 is a Psalm of Trust when he was fleeing from Absalom

• This is when David has everything falling around him and his own child is trying to kill him

• He is saying, “Trust God.”

• Similar to the priest who wrote this section

• “This is my identity. This is the most important thing any of us could do is to develop this relationship with our Lord. We can trust Him.”

• That last part of this pillar is on The Lord’s Prayer

• Here is something Sr. Miriam hopes we all get in these next days

• She hopes that we come to a deeper understanding in our hearts of how deeply we are loved by God

• The Lord perceives us of infinite value

• The Lord receives us and we are not alone

• WE ARE NOT ALONE!!

• This is not a joke or some cosmic game that God is playing with us

• Jesus takes on EVERY SINGLE ONE OF OUR SUFFERINGS and all of our joys and unites us to Himself

• Jesus gives us back Himself in return

• Who loves like that?

• We need to be continually pierced by the love of Jesus

• Hopefully we can each come not into a formulaic kind of reiteration of some prayer

• But each one of us, in our own way, comes into a deeper intimacy with Jesus

• THAT IS THE ETERNAL TRUTH!!

• We are going to spend Heaven with the One who loves us forever for all eternity

• We have heard that God loves us

• Many of us don’t believe that God loves us

• We believe that God tolerates us

• We need to know the UNSTOPPABLE love of God for us

• We need to be willing to give God permission to love us is the prayer

• Fr. Mike is praying FOR YOU!!

• Please pray for Fr. Mike and for each other!!

• I cannot WAIT…