What is Prayer?

I don't know if anyone else suffers from this problem, but I tend to forget things easily. I am also not a very organized person and can be scatter-brained so if I don't write things down, I easily forget. One spiritual thing I realized I forgot about recently was "The Jesus Prayer". I used to do a version of this quite often but as life got busy, I got away from it. This Lent, the Lord reminded me of it. By his grace, I picked it up again, repeating this prayer often throughout the day. 

One version I say is "Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner."  I also like to repeat the verse from Revelations 4:1-8 "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty  who was and is and is to come!" Do you know what began to happen? As I began saying these prayers, I found myself getting a lot less agitated and becoming more patient, especially with my kids. You see...it is not necessarily about the words and how many times they are spoken. It is about being mindful of God and becoming aware of his presence; being aware that we are in him and he is in us and walking in the knowledge of that. It is about leaning back in Christ and receiving his grace and strength; uniting ourselves with him. Ultimately, that is what prayer is. It is not about how many words we say. Scripture even says, "Do not babble like the pagans." (Matthew 6:7). It is about uniting ourselves with Christ and abiding in him. Repetitious prayers like "The Jesus Prayer" and the rosary are wonderful tools that can help us do that.   

Another powerful form of prayer that unites us with Christ is adoration. When we adore Christ, we stand in awe of his greatness. This is a way to honor and worship him. A beautiful form of adoration is Eucharistic Adoration. This is when the Eucharist (which Catholics believe to be fully Jesus) is exposed on the altar. This makes it easy to adore him, because even if he is hidden under the appearance of bread, his presence is usually very tangible. Since my church only has Eucharistic adoration once a month, I have found other ways to spend time in adoration. I personally like to gaze at a picture of Jesus, like an artist's rendition from the Shroud of Turin. This has proved to be very fruitful in my own prayer life. In fact, I believe the Lord once told me that he left this image for us as a gift and he wants his face to be imprinted on our hearts.

I also want to talk about intercessory prayer because I think it is often misunderstood. I know I have talked about this before and I don't want to sound like a broken record but it is something I feel passionate about and want others to understand. Intercession is about us acknowledging God's goodness and mercy. It is about us being aware of what he already wants to do and then participating with him. Through intercession we should be joining our hearts to his heart  for the person or situation that needs prayer. What intercession should not become is us begging God to act as if he is an ogre withholding good things from his children. I think he even finds this insulting and one of the reasons we don't always see our prayers being answered. He is pleased when his children trust him and believe in his goodness. 

There are many different types of prayer and ways to pray, but the true goal of all prayer should be to encounter God and to become more united with him through Christ! True prayer is transformative! True, faith-filled prayer that unites us with Christ causes heaven and earth to collide and we begin to experience God's Kingdom in the here and now!   

Be a Living Rosary!

Drawing by Anna Ponchak

I believe God calls us to the vocation that is going to best help us encounter him and help us grow in holiness. The more we encounter him and grow in holiness, the more joy we will have. For me, that vocation is Motherhood. 

My children have definitely helped me in my quest for holiness and have helped me grow closer to Christ. Through my first two, the Lord started teaching me about resting in him and receiving his grace. The next two helped teach me perseverance. Number six, our boy taught me that God is faithful to his promises. Through my fifth child however, I feel like I have grown the most. You see, she was miserable from day one and continued to be that way until she turned four. She cried all the time, even when I would hold her. She also would not go to anyone else but me and she constantly wanted to be held and nursed so I never got a break. 

One day I was sitting in the rocking chair, that she dictated I sit in, and nursed her while also reading a book a friend gave me. The book was Interior Freedom, by Fr. Jacques Philippe. I read stories about people that had been prisoners in concentration camps but still had joy and peace because they had found an interior freedom that came from knowing Christ. I cried as I read this book because like them, I also felt like a prisoner, just to a lesser degree. Before my fifth daughter was born, I kind of had it all together, or at least I thought I did. Everything was somewhat under control. I was usually able to complete my "to-do-list" every day. After Sarah showed up however, my world seemed to fall apart. That book helped me to see that there was a lot of work that the Holy Spirit still needed to do in my heart. I realized he was calling me to a higher level of surrender.

I began to realize that my main goal everyday was to complete my mental "to-do-list". I even had prayer on that list. If anything stood in the way of me getting my list completed, I would lose my peace and my joy and my family suffered. After two years of struggling to row upstream and crying out to the Lord, "WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?!", he finally showed me my problem. He impressed on me that my main goal every day needed to be to encounter him and help my children encounter him. I then realized, that even though I was making it a priority to pray everyday, I wasn't necessarily taking the time to encounter him. By just trying to complete my "to-do-list" everyday, I had become like a hamster on a hamster wheel and life lost it's joy and felt like drudgery.

In his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis said, "The joy of the Gospel fills the hearts and lives of all those who encounter Christ."

When our main goal is to encounter Christ, well, we can do that no matter what is going on in our lives. We can encounter Jesus in the joys of life. We can encounter him in the sorrows and the cross. We can encounter him on the mountaintop or the valley. We can find him in the mundane and the thrilling. Most everything we experience, Jesus experienced. He was and is a person. These are also the things we meditate on when we pray a Rosary. 

For my Protestant friends who may think the Rosary is all about Mary, it really is not. Through the Rosary, we meditate on the Gospel, the life of Jesus. Yes, there are also Marian prayers. Through these we ask Mary for her intercession and to bring us into a deeper relationship with her son. There are also a few things we experience, especially those of us who are mother's, that Mary instead of Jesus experienced. She experienced the joy and sorrow of being a mother. It is okay to meditate on these things (Philippians 4:8). Jesus gave her as a gift to us (John 19:27) and we can find comfort in her story because it is our story too. Unlike Jesus who was also fully God, Mary was fully human and yet she was highly favored and full of grace (Luke 1:28). This should encourage us of how much we also are loved and the level that God desires to elevate us and how we, like Mary are also called to magnify him (Luke 1:46). This is also what we as Catholics meditate on when we pray a Rosary. Mainly though, through the Rosary we meditate on the life of Jesus. We meditate on his joys, his adventures, his sorrows, and his glory. It is all covered in the Rosary. The goal then is to join our lives to his. In this way, we become a living Rosary.