But
when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father
in secret. And your Father who sees in
secret will repay you.
Prayer is the raising
up of our minds and hearts to God, either to praise Him, or to thank Him, or to
beg His grace. As such, the
Christian tradition comprises three major expressions of the life of prayer:
vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplative prayer. They have in common the recollection of the
heart:
1. VOCAL PRAYER, founded on the union of body and soul in
human nature, associates the body with the interior prayer of the heart,
following Christ's example of praying to his Father and teaching the Our Father
to his disciples. We are body and
spirit, and we experience the need to translate our feelings externally. We
must pray with our whole being to give all power possible to our supplication. During Sunday mass or services, we are called
to vocal prayer as we worship and glorify Him.
2. MEDITATION is a prayerful quest engaging thought, imagination,
emotion, and desire. Its goal is to make
our own in faith the subject considered, by confronting it with the reality of
our own life. We are usually
helped by books: the Sacred Scriptures,
particularly the Gospels, holy icons, liturgical texts of the day or season,
writings of the spiritual fathers, works of spirituality, the great book of
creation, and that of history the page on which the "today" of God is
written. Eventually, this prompts
the conversion of our heart, and strengthen our will to follow Christ.
3. CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER is the simple expression of the mystery of
prayer. It is a gaze of faith fixed on
Jesus, attentive to the Word of God, a silent love. It achieves real union with the prayer of
Christ to the extent that it makes us share in his mystery. It is the humble way of surrendering
to the loving will of the Father in ever deeper union with his beloved Son.
Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding and my will; all that I have and possess. You have given them to me; to you, O Lord, I
restore them. All things are yours: Dispose of them according to your will. Give me your love and your grace; for this is
enough for me.
Blessed the man who fears the Lord.
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