Catechism: What is Prayer?
Catechism 63: What is Prayer
Just as the lungs enable the human body to live by breathing in life giving oxygen, so prayer enables the human soul to live by breathing in the life-giving Holy Spirit. Pope Francis said in the course of an address “Breathing is made up of two stages: inhaling, the intake of air, and exhaling, the letting out of air. The spiritual life is fed, nourished, by prayer and is expressed outwardly through mission: inhaling and exhaling. When we inhale, by prayer, we receive the fresh air of the Holy Spirit. When exhaling this air, we announce Jesus Christ risen by the same Spirit.” As St Vincent de Paul said, “Just as the body cannot live without the soul, so the soul cannot live without prayer.”
There are many well-known definitions of prayer. For example, par. 2559 of the CCC quotes the familiar saying of St John Damascene: “prayer is a matter of raising one’s mind and heart to God, or the requesting of good things from God.” I have long thought that it is an unsatisfactory description in so far as it emphasises what we do while neglecting to mention what it is that the Lord does. In the instruction, Some Aspects of Christian Meditation there is a more satisfactory description in par. 3: “Prayer is defined, properly speaking, as a personal, intimate and profound dialogue between people and God.” The best definitions of prayer variously see it relational terms as a conversation, discussion, dialogue, or colloquy. It is true that we raise our minds and hearts to God, but the Lord responds by revealing the divine mind and heart to us. In her autobiography St Teresa of Avila offered a classic definition of prayer when she described it as: “nothing other than an intimate friendship, a frequent, but private, heart to heart conversation with him by whom we know ourselves to be loved."
Moses was one of the great men of prayer in the Bible. There is an archetypal passage in Ex 33:11 which tells us that having poured out his heart to God he paid undivided attention to the Lord. It goes on to say that: “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.” Our desire to know God will be satisfied to the extent that we too areable to pay self-forgetful attention to the twin bibles of the created world and the Holy Scriptures, both of which can mediate the presence, word and will of the Lord. The etymology of the word ‘attention’ is interesting. It means “to stretch” or to “incline” the mind, in order to understand the realities, we perceive. The Catholic Encyclopaedia comments: ''Attention is the very essence of prayer; as soon as attention ceases, prayer ceases.''
Speaking about prayer, St Vincent de Paul cited the example of Moses when he said, "Prayer is the reservoir in which you will receive the instructions you need to fulfil your duties. When in doubt, have recourse to God and say to him: "O Lord, you are the Father of light, teach me what I ought to do in this circumstance. I give you this advice not only for those difficulties which will cause you pain, but also that you may learn from God directly what you shall have to teach, following the example of Moses who proclaimed to the people of Israel only that with which God had inspired him, e.g., "The Lord says this."
In the NT Jesus was seen as the new Moses who prayed to his Father in the intmate way his predecessor had done. He would pull his prayer shawl over his head and enter the tabernacle of his heart where he would speak to his Father, and then his Father would speakdirecly to his his heart by revealing what he should say and do. One could refer to this kind of prayer as being prophetic because rather than relying on ones own thoughts and imagesit is rooted in direct revelation from God.
The CCC recommends the psalms in the OT not only as a model of prayer, but also as a prayer resource. The Psalms are the heartbeat of biblical prayer—raw, poetic, and deeply human. They give voice to every shade of the soul: joy and despair, praise and protest, longing and love. Here's a brief look at how prayer and the Psalms intertwine. They model prayer as a two-way conversation—sometimes the psalmist speaks to God, sometimes to the people, and sometimes even to his own soul. The Psalms teach that no emotion is off-limits in prayer. Anger, grief, doubt, and ecstasy all belong before God. Many psalms are deeply personal cries to God (like Psalm 51 or 22), while others are communal hymns of thanksgiving or lament (like Psalms 95 or 137).
