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Prayer
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Catholic Practices
In this course, Professor Lewis Ayres (Durham University) explores practices in the Catholic Church. In the first lecture, we consider prayer. In the second lecture, we look at piety. In the third lecture we explore pilgrimage, before turning to the funeral rite in the fourth lecture. In the fifth lecture, we consider practices from Jesus’ command to love your neighbour. In the sixth and final lecture, we focus on mission.
Prayer
In this lecture, we explore the nature of prayer within Catholic practices, focusing on: (i) the definition of prayer as a lifting of the mind and heart towards God, emphasising its communal and personal dimensions; (ii) the early Christian tradition of communal prayer, rooted in Jewish practices, often involving the Psalms, which helped shape a collective Christian imagination; (iii) the importance of individual prayer, exemplified by Christ's own prayers, which serves as a means of waiting on God and seeking divine presence; (iv) the Rosary as a key Catholic tradition, involving repetitive prayers that help lift the mind away from worldly distractions and focus on God; (v) the role of prayer as an act of asking, rooted in the acknowledgment of dependence on God, yet requiring the discernment of what to ask for; and (vi) the understanding of prayer as a long-term discipline, shaping one's attentiveness to God's presence beyond moments of crisis.
My name is Lewis Ayers.
00:00:06I am professor of Catholic and historical theology at the
00:00:07University of Durham,
00:00:11and I'm going to talk to you about Catholic practices.
00:00:13In this video, I want to talk first about prayer.
00:00:16What is prayer?
00:00:20Most simply, prayer is a lifting of the mind and the
00:00:22heart towards God.
00:00:26Prayer is in some ways a form of waiting.
00:00:28I suppose it's very easy to think of prayer primarily as an asking,
00:00:35as an act in which people say,
00:00:42God help me in this situation or that
00:00:44situation, God help so and so not be run
00:00:48over by a car, or my relative who is sick.
00:00:51And prayer certainly involves an element of asking but I
00:00:55want to talk about asking at the end of this video
00:01:00rather than the beginning.
00:01:04When we think about the development of Christian habits of praying,
00:01:07I think we've got to talk about two other things
00:01:13first and most importantly.
00:01:16The first thing we need to talk about is the Christian
00:01:20tradition of communal prayer.
00:01:22One of the things you'll notice if you look through the book of
00:01:25Acts is that there are plenty of occasions on which
00:01:28Christians are praying together.
00:01:31So, perhaps most famously,
00:01:34Paul with his companions is in prison,
00:01:38singing psalms at night.
00:01:42Why?
00:01:44Well, probably because he maintained the Jewish practice of saying
00:01:45particular prayers at certain times of the day,
00:01:49something that many Christians still keep and many Christian communities
00:01:53keep up as an essential part of the Christian life.
00:01:59Very early on in Christian tradition we see the emergence
00:02:04of communal practices of prayer in
00:02:09the morning or in the evening in churches.
00:02:12Often those prayers will be using the Psalms
00:02:16because that's something that Christianity
00:02:21inherited from Judaism
00:02:23as texts which are given to us not simply as a record of,
00:02:26people's emotional lives in ancient Israel,
00:02:31but almost as a language in which to talk to God.
00:02:34And the significance of praying the Psalms and of praying communally
00:02:38was that it served the function of
00:02:45shaping what we might call the Christian imagination,
00:02:48of thinking towards God, of waiting for God's response,
00:02:52of being thankful to God for life in the world
00:02:57and the good things about life in the world,
00:03:03of praying to God communally
00:03:06to ask God to remove certain of the horrific aspects
00:03:09or difficult aspects of life in the world.
00:03:14So prayer is in essence,
00:03:18at the beginning of Christianity,
00:03:20a communal act and it's an act that's shaped
00:03:22by existing Jewish traditions in which especially the Psalms are used.
00:03:27And within the Catholic tradition,
00:03:32you will find monastic communities of monks or nuns
00:03:35who even today retain the practice of having a set
00:03:39round of prayers during the day,
00:03:44structuring their time and life by communal aspects of prayer.
00:03:47Many individual Catholics will also say some form of morning
00:03:52or evening prayer,
00:03:57either singly or together.
00:03:59But even if they are saying that prayer by themselves,
00:04:02it's more accurate to say they are joining in the community
00:04:05of other Christians who pray together.
00:04:09There's some sense in which prayer is always a communal
00:04:12act of human beings looking towards God and
00:04:16worshiping God and raising the heart and the
00:04:22mind towards God.
00:04:26And that's so important because for Christians one of
00:04:28the realities of living in the world is that we become very
00:04:31easily obsessed by material things in the world.
00:04:36We spend our time wanting material things because they
00:04:41are so easily and deeply attractive to us
00:04:45and not looking past them to the one who contains the whole world, I.
00:04:50E. God.
00:04:56So one of the central things that the practice of prayer
00:04:57does is to shape the imagination towards God.
00:05:00So I said there were two things that I needed to mention.
00:05:05The first is the importance of communal prayer based around
00:05:08the Jewish Psalms
00:05:12used by Christians.
00:05:14The second thing is various traditions of individual prayer.
00:05:15So these are also related to existing Jewish traditions
00:05:21of individual prayer that are taken over by Christians.
00:05:25So Christ himself prays, perhaps most famously in the
00:05:29Garden of Gethsemane,
00:05:33before he is arrested and taken to be crucified.
00:05:35Traditions of individual prayer grow up and develop in
00:05:39different ways and the purpose of individual
00:05:44prayer is once again primarily
00:05:48a raising up of the mind towards God and
00:05:52a waiting on God.
00:05:56And it's worth dwelling for a moment on that theme of waiting.
00:06:00Christians since the beginning
00:06:06have sometimes conceived of their prayer life as a
00:06:09conversation with God and they feel that their prayers are
00:06:13answered either by
00:06:16receiving a sense of the presence of God
00:06:20or an indication that they should do one thing rather than
00:06:24another, and in some cases by apparitions
00:06:28or by hearing voices, but very often simply by having
00:06:33a sense that their prayers have been answered in a certain way.
00:06:38But prayer is perhaps more fundamentally a waiting
00:06:41upon God, and the act of waiting itself transforms
00:06:47the human mind and enables the mind to recognize its existence
00:06:52before the immensity and mystery of the divine.
00:06:57And that in itself is a massive achievement
00:07:01given the multiple attractions of the the physical,
00:07:05the material world.
00:07:09Now in the Catholic tradition there are all sorts of
00:07:10traditions of individual prayer And perhaps the most famous is the Rosary,
00:07:14as a series of prayers that develops in the Middle Ages.
00:07:20Prayer in the case of the Rosary is a,
00:07:25is an act of repetition,
00:07:28of saying short prayers over and over again.
00:07:30Now if you think about prayer primarily
00:07:36as an act of asking,
00:07:40which happens only in extreme moments,
00:07:42then something like the Rosary can seem very odd.
00:07:45But if you think about prayer as primarily an act of
00:07:50waiting and an act of raising the mind towards God,
00:07:54then traditions of prayer that are repetitive,
00:07:58like the rosary,
00:08:02or also repetitive but in a more extended way,
00:08:04saying morning and evening prayer and using the same
00:08:08Psalms over many years,
00:08:11those actions can suddenly seem a bit more meaningful if you
00:08:14recognize that the goal of that prayer is the lifting of the
00:08:18mind away from the things of this world and being open and
00:08:22attentive to the presence of God.
00:08:26It's only once, I think,
00:08:29you get that perspective that you ought to think about prayer
00:08:31as an act of asking.
00:08:34Because one of the simple realities
00:08:38that you find, I think,
00:08:42embedded in the New Testament and you find it in Christian
00:08:43teaching for the past two thousand years
00:08:47is that Christians should ask for things.
00:08:49Why?
00:08:55Because knowing that the ultimate,
00:08:56author of the world and of providence is God means that we
00:08:59should ask God for things.
00:09:03But we also recognize in the Catholic tradition that we
00:09:05don't necessarily know what we should ask for.
00:09:09So it's very easy, I think,
00:09:14from the outside of the Catholic tradition to say,
00:09:16you Christians pray for things that you almost never receive.'
00:09:20From within the Catholic tradition,
00:09:26I think the response to that sort of questioning is to say,
00:09:28well, that in some sense is not the purpose of asking.
00:09:31The purpose of asking is to help us recognize that we
00:09:35depend upon God, and yet at the same time,
00:09:39for us to be engaged in a process of recognizing that we
00:09:43know not what to ask for and that learning what to ask
00:09:46for is itself something which takes time.
00:09:50In all of these, to conclude,
00:09:53prayer comes across as a discipline or as a practice,
00:09:56not simply something that Christians
00:10:00ought to do in moments of extreme danger.
00:10:04There are, as someone famously said, no atheists in a foxhole,
00:10:08and that's very important.
00:10:14But prayer is primarily a discipline which happens over a
00:10:15long period of time, and once you understand that,
00:10:19then I think you can understand why there are these different
00:10:22forms of Christian prayer.
00:10:25
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ayres, L. (2024, October 22). Catholic Practices - Prayer [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/catholic-practices
MLA style
Ayres, L. "Catholic Practices – Prayer." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 22 Oct 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/catholic-practices