An Introduction to Prayer by Robert Barron

(New York: Word on Fire, 2024-08-12), 152

For so short a book, this is a most helpful introduction to prayer or invitation to go deeper in prayer. I was most struck by the way Catherine addresses Jesus as she prays:

St. Catherine would often recite the Divine Office while walking along a cloister in the company of Jesus, mystically visible to the saint. When she came to the conclusion of a Psalm, she would speak the words of the Glory Be, but her version was as follows: ‘Glory be to the Father, and to Thee [tibi], and to the Holy Ghost!’ For her, Christ was not a distant figure, and prayer was not an abstract exercise. Rather, the Lord was at her side, and prayer was a conversation between friends. (30)

Notes


Contents


Preface

Chapter 1: Raising the Mind and Heart to God

  • Prayer is the coming together of our longing for God and God's longing for us (4)
  • Sainte-Chapelle in Paris powerfully evokes the power of prayer (4)
  • One of the fundamental truths in the Bible is that the spiritual life is not primarily our quest for God, but rather God's quest for us. "You did not choose me, but I chose you." (4-5, cf. Jn-15)

Chapter 2: A Conversation Between Friends

  • If prayer is a conversation between friends, we must take the time: we must schedule substantial and intentional time with God, and "waste time" with God. (6-7)
  • In this time we speak honestly, listen, and be silent.

Chapter 3: The Christian Difference

_Summary: _

  • "The Christian difference is that the one God has revealed himself in three persons and that the Father has sent his Son into our humanity, and indeed, all the way down into sin and death. Thus, when we pray, the Son stands beside us, helping us to prayer to the Father in the Holy Spirit." (11)
  • Christian prayer is listening intently as the Father and the Son speak about you: we pray in God, and not just to him. (12)
  • The fundamental move is prayer to the Father, with the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
  • The very act of prayer is necessarily communal and corporate.

Chapter 4: The Disorienting Quality of Real Prayer

  • Iris Murdoch: We require are spiritual exercises to break us out of the prison of self-absorption: learning a foreign language, contemplating a true work of art, etc.
  • Similarly, we want to pray not like the Pharisee but the publican (Lk-18-14)

Chapter 5: Transfigured Prayer

  • To commune with God we need to get out of the everyday grind. (19)
  • The saints are those who become so much like God that they become beacons or torches for those around them. (20)
  • The fruit of prayer in the biblical tradition is always action on behalf of the world. (21)
  • Why do we pray? To commune with God, to commune with the saints, but finally, to become a vehicle of God's grace. (22)

Part II: Principles of Prayer

Chapter 6: The Four Rules of Prayer

  • Four rules for prayer from the Bible and refined by the tradition:
    1. Pray with Faith (faith is how we cooperate with grace)
    2. If you want your prayer answered, forgive
    3. Pray with perseverance
    4. Pray in Jesus' name (an effective way to monitor the quality and shape the content of our prayer)

Chapter 7: Why We Should Address Jesus as Thou (★)

  • From a sermon by Archbishop J. Peter Sartain: "according to Raymond of Capua, Catherine would often recite the Divine Office while walking along a cloister in the company of Jesus, mystically visible to the saint. When she came to the conclusion of a Psalm, she would speak the words of the Glory Be, but her version was as follows: ‘Glory be to the Father, and to Thee [tibi], and to the Holy Ghost!’ For her, Christ was not a distant figure, and prayer was not an abstract exercise. Rather, the Lord was at her side, and prayer was a conversation between friends." (30, cf. ~The 35 Doctors of the Church)
  • Thou/thine/thee seem more rarified to us today, but these are actually the intimate usage of the second person pronouns.

Chapter 8: The Prayers of the Saints

  • The internet as analogous to the communion of saints according to Brandon Vogt.

Part III: Types of Prayer

Chapter 9: Contrition and Cleansing the Temple

_Summary: _

  • In the hard, grinding work of contrition, the sinner feels the pain that his sin has caused himself and others. (41)
  • Barron in this section gives a beautiful mediation on the Ten Commandments:
  • The most basic intuition of the Bible is that having an ultimate concern other than God leads to disaster, to a falling apart of the self.
  • Worship cannot be simply an interior disposition; is must express itself though action.
  • The love God is to love everyone whom God loves.
  • Temper: Do you enhance the lives of those around you, or are people less alive after they've been with you?
  • Say all you want in criticism of another, as long as you are willing ot commit yourself to helping that person deal with the problem you have named.

Chapter 10: Adoration and Right Praise

  • To pray in a stance of adoration is to be mouth to mouth with God, breathing in his divine life and breathing out praise. (46)
  • The entiety of the biblical narrative could be read as the story of God's attempts to lure his people back into right priase to enable human flourishing. (47)

Chapter 11: Give Thanks in All Circumstances

  • "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances." 1 Thes-05-18 is one of the earliest Christian text. (50)
  • Aquinas: God is not one competitive being among many, but that which undergirds all aspects of reality. (51)
  • Jean-Pierre de Caussade: Everything that happens to us is, directly or indirectly, an express of the will of God. (51)
  • Once we understand that God's will stands behind absolutely everything that we experience, then we can find that deep joy that the Bible calls "peace". (52)
  • The only proper response is gratitude and admiration, and appreciation of God's will. (52)

Chapter 12: Prayer of Petition

_Summary: _

  • Augustine: God wants us to ask, seek, and petition persistently not in order that he might be changed but that we might be changed. In the very process of hungering and thirsting for certain goods, we make ourselves worthy vessels. (55-56)
  • Whatever is good and right and true in our prayer is God already praying in us, adjusting our desire to his desire. (56)

Part IV: Contemplative Prayer

Chapter 13: John of the Cross and the Dark Night of the Soul

  • John of the Cross in The Living Flame of Love: we have within us "great cavers" of the intellect, will, and feeling, which are infinite because they are ordered to God. (61)
  • The Dark Night: to order the soul to God we must rid it of attachments to anything less than God—the dark night leads to the proper order of desire with God first and everything else second for the sake of God (62-63)
  • The purgative path is painful, and john's spiritual style is austere. But when the purgations are complete the soul is ready to receive the gift that God wants to give. (63-64)

Chapter 14: Teresa of Avila and Finding the Center

  • To Teresa of Ávila, Christ dwelling in her was like an interior castle. (68)
  • Meister Eckhart: "We must make ourselves indifferent to all created things." (70)

Chapter 15: Thomas Merton and the Virginal Point

  • The theme of Thomas Merton's early writings was contemplation as he learned from John of the Cross (72)
  • Merton spoke of the "virginal point," the place of contact between the soul and Christ. (72)

Part V: Liturgical Prayer

Chapter 16: The Mass

_Summary: _

  • The Mass is the most important practice of prayer, the "source and summit of the Christian life." (77, cf. SC 10)
  • The Christian prays not so much to God as inside of God, from within the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (79)

Chapter 17: The Liturgy of the Hours

  • Ps-119: "Seven times a day I praise You."
  • Let the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours (the Church's highest form of prayer after the Mass) inform your spiritual life as you work to sanctify the secular order. (84)

Chapter 18: The Creed

  • The content of the great mysteries of the Creed are not fully given in the formulas themselves; we approach that completeness only through repeated narrating of the tale and through the concrete living of the Christian life. (89)

Part VI: Devotional Prayer

Chapter 19: The Holy Hour

  • Fulton Sheen is the "great prophet of the Holy Hour": a sustained, uninterrupted hour of prayer in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. (93)
  • Barron: "The Holy Hour has also become a key part of my own spiritual life. When I'm home, I begin every day going to my chapel and spending an hour in prayer." (93)
  • The importance of the Holy Hour is that it is about cultivating our relationship with Jesus, at least like a dog at the master's door, ready in case he called me." (93-94)
  • Whatever you do during the Holy Hour, the most important thing is to commit to it. (94)
  • "Stay close to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. The Master is waiting or us; let us watch an hour with him and listen for his call." (94)

Chapter 20: The Rosary

  • The Rosary is important because: 1) it is embodied, concrete, densely objective; 2) it is a way of disciplining the mind for meditation; and 3) it slows us down.

Chapter 21: The Stations of the Cross

  • Even a cursory reading of the Gospels reveals that Jesus' death is the center and goal of the narrative. (99)
  • The assault on death was the ultimate mission of the Son of God. Jesus has gone to the limits of godforsakenness. He has established himself at the farthest output, there is literally nowhere to hide from him. (101)
  • The cross must become the very structure of the Christian life. (102)

Chapter 22: The Jesus Prayer

_Summary: _

  • The body precedes the mind, as when kneeling gives rise to keen feelings of devotion. (103)
  • The Way of a Pilgrim teaches how the Jesus Prayer is an answer to Paul's instruction to "pray without ceasing" (105, cf. 1 Thes-05)

Part VII: Scriptural Prayer

Chapter 23: Lectio Divina

  • Pope Benedict warmly recommends Lectio divina in Verbum Domini. (109)
    1. Read the scriptural text carefully
    2. PIck out one word or passage that strikes you, meditating on it
    3. Speak to God, telling him how your heart was moved by what your read
    4. Listen to the Lord, discerning what he speaks back to you
  • If you spend time with these four steps of lectio divina the Bible will spring to life. (111)

Chapter 24: The Our Father

  • The Our Father link us to all of the great figures in Christian history (112, cf. when Jesus sends out the Apostles in Mt-10—as depicted in The Chosen, they don't know anything at all, yet they are already teaching others the Lord's Prayer)
  • The Son of God, the very Word made flesh, teaches us to pray. The Our Father is the model of all prayer. (112)
  • "Hallowed by thy name": our basic problem is getting our priorities mixed up. We're praying that we might honor God in and above all things. If we get this wrong, we get everything else wrong. (113)
  • "Thy kingdom come": Origen said that Jesus is the kingdom in person—autobasileia. (114)
  • "Give us this day our daily bread": epiousion is rendered as daily bread, but the literal sense is super-substantial bread. What we ask for in the Eucharist is intimate communion with the living Christ. (115)
  • "Forgive us our trespasses": what Jesus came to do, first and foremost, was to forgive our sins. (116)

Chapter 25: The Psalms

  • There is in the psalms the aching, longing, and delight of the heart. (120, cf. John Henry Newman's motto Cor ad cor loquitur—Heart speaks to heart)
  • In a fallen world, the righeous man will have enemies, and the more righeious he is, the more of them he will have. The person with no enemies is not to be trusted, for he stands for nothing. (121)
  • The Church has used the Psalms liturgically as the optimal way to respond to the Word of God, they are the privileged manner in which we speak back to the God who has spoken to us. (122)

Chapter 26: The De Profundis

  • Ps-130: De profundis—out of the depths
  • Robinson Crusoe is a strict allegory of the Christian life.

Topic: Prayer

Source

  • St. Brenden's Church

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Created: 2024-11-03-Sun
Updated: 2024-11-16-Sat