Prayer, Pleasure and Belongings

A regimen of prayer is sometimes rejected with the opposition that you should only pray when you feel like praying. Practice suggests that except for times of trouble or fear, like immediately after the terrorist attacks of 9-11, many people do not pray at all. The press made a big deal about the newfound religiosity of Americans after the attack and yet it proved to be short-lived. It is sometimes complained by people that God seems far away. While there might be a wonderful sense of satisfaction in prayer after a recent conversion or reconciliation after a long absence from Christian practice, when the good feeling that comes with prayer disappears, many people stop praying. Others narrow their focus to the prayer of petition; when they do not get what they want, they get angry and give up on God.

Fortunately, God has not given up on us. While worship and faith should touch the emotions, we should not allow our faith or our obligations as Christians to be dictated by our emotions. This is true about prayer, about the moral life, indeed, about any and all Christian responsibilities. It is a hard lesson for a pleasure oriented society to understand. Couples errantly judge their happiness and compatibility based on their sex lives. When someone comes along who is more attractive or who pleases more, too many people break up with their beloved and/or spouse. A woman wants a baby because of the happiness of fulfillment while another aborts her child because she prefers the sex to motherhood. While the latter position is very wrong, the former needs to accept motherhood as a duty of marriage no matter whether it brings joy or pain. It will bring both. A family goes to Mass when they feel like it, irrespective of the precept of the Church that binds us under the pain of mortal sin. Everyone has time for sleazy television shows and titillating movies, but no time for “boring” bible study and “unsatisfying” prayer. We get what we put into our faith activities. If we put nothing of ourselves in worship, prayer, discipleship, and charity— then we cannot expect much of a return. God wants us to be open receptacles to his presence and love. Remember the famous picture of Jesus knocking on a door? The artist was criticized for forgetting the doorknob. However, he responded that the deletion was intentional. He exclaimed that Jesus waits at the door of the human heart, a door that only we can open from the inside. Our Lord is waiting for us to answer the door and to know him better.

It must be admitted that the Catholic community of late has lost many members to other denominations. When asked why they defect, a frequent answer is that they find Catholic churches cold and the worship bland. Particularly among various ethnic and minority groups, Protestants have been very successful with making people feel welcome. There is no tabernacle, no altar in many cases, and no priesthood or sacrifice. But they read God’s Word, ministers speak with clarity, and worship is filled with shouts of praise and song. The Evangelicals and many other Protestants find the presence of Jesus in one another. Others place the gravity in the Word of God that is preached and studied. The more Pentecostal traditions posit the presence of God in ecstatic utterances, like prophecy and tongues.

While the old Latin Mass was very impressive in rituals and an aura of otherness was manifested by use of an ancient tongue and music that was strictly found in churches (Gregorian chant and polyphony); the modern liturgy is crudely translated with bland prayers and the music is sentimental, banal and often resembles folk music from the 1960’s. It is ironic that the new Mass often comes across as more dated than the old Mass with traditions going back many centuries. Catholics located the presence of our Lord most centrally toward the altar and in the tabernacle. While non-Catholic communities stress fellowship with one another, Catholics emphasized worship and ritual. The presence of God in Jesus Christ is found in the Eucharist. Catholics would enter a church, cross themselves with holy water, genuflect at the pew, cross themselves again, and kneel and pray before the Blessed Sacrament. When tabernacles were moved to side altars or hidden, this also effectively eliminated the prayer of adoration toward the sacrament that preceded Mass. If a Catholic truly believes that the Mass is a re-presentation of Calvary and that the consecrated wafer and chalice are indeed the presence of the Risen Christ, then it should not matter if the accidental elements are lackluster and the priest is dreadful. The fact that people leave the Church is evidence that they did not have an authentic Catholic faith initially. The greatest prayer of the Catholic Christian is the Mass. It is a scandal that so many Catholics do not understand it. Every Mass is a participation in the heavenly marriage banquet of the Lamb. The prayerful Catholic understands that he or she cannot desire heaven and then purposely, with no good reason, skip Sunday Mass which offers us the rations from the Promised Shore— in other words, a taste of heaven itself.

Everyone experiences occasional dry spells at prayer. Even the saints, like St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross endured these “dark nights of the soul.” But, as I have taught and preached so many times, those are precisely the occasions when we should most dedicate ourselves to prayer. God might feel absent, but he is still by our side. He wants to wean us from the satisfaction that prayer gives so that we might love and want him more for himself than for his gifts.

When people say that prayer does nothing for them and that they feel no need, they have closed their eyes against faith. It might be considered a kind of atheism because they seriously doubt that prayer makes any difference. Saying that God does not care is similar to saying the there is no God to listen and come to our aid.

Pope John Paul II has warned about this situation in the West where secular humanism and materialism has infected the people in the pews. While our sights were set on godless Communism for so many decades, there were forces at work in our own society that were counterproductive to faith. Some have made medicine and science into their gods. And yet, people still get sick and die. Some of the best doctors in my experience were those who prayed before surgery and gave the thanks for their successes to God. Other people seem enraptured by material wealth and things. We have created a society of collectors and houses that only hold one or two people are larger today to contain all our stuff—many times larger than the homes of the past that were filled with children. Ironically, our hands are so filled that the gift of Christ, which requires no money to buy, is often dropped or left on the shelf. We have cell phones and can talk to people from coast to coast where ever we go. But, we often fail to talk to God for whom we have unlimited minutes each month, and not just on nights and weekends. We have so much. It would be a tragedy that we should forfeit our immortal souls.