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If you can think, you can pray. If you can desire, you can pray. Father Hugh Barbour explains why including God in the things you are already doing can turn your life into a life of prayer.
Cy Kellett:
Actually, you do have time to pray. Father Hugh explains next.
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. We all feel … Well, we shouldn’t say we all, but lots and lots of us feel overwhelmed much of the time, and we’re overwhelmed in part because we don’t have time. We just feel like we’re going all the time, meeting the needs of the family, the needs of work, and all these other things, and so we end up feeling, I don’t have time to pray. Other people, I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to be doing when I’m praying. I don’t know. It doesn’t work when I try to pray.
Well, Father Hugh explains that a proper understanding of prayer will help us to get over a lot of that. We in fact do have time to pray. We have time to include God in all that we’re doing. If we know what actual prayer is, it’s much easier to have confidence that what we’re doing is in fact praying.
Remember to subscribe to Focus on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to the podcasts. Also ,that five star review really helps, if you’d give us that wherever you get your podcasts. It helps to grow this podcast. Let’s listen to what Father Hugh has to say about prayer.
Cy Kellett:
Father, what do you say to the person who says, “I can’t pray,” either “I can’t pray,” or “I don’t know how to pray,” or “I don’t know what I’m doing when I’m praying”? Can you help that person?
Father Hugh:
Well, the first thing that you would want to do is first take away the verb, to pray.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay.
Father Hugh:
Say, “I can’t think anything. I can’t desire anything. I can’t want anything.”
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Father Hugh:
“I can’t consider anything, can’t imagine anything.” Then that would be the equivalent, because pray simply means doing all those things in relationship to God and to his Holy ones. You’re thinking about him. You’re desiring him, hopefully. You’re wanting certain things. You’re enjoying certain things. You’re afraid of certain things. Basically these are experiences of our subjective life of knowledge and of affect, of desire. Pray or prayer kind of sums all that up.
Now, the word pray or to pray comes originally from word that means to ask for something. That’s where most words that have to do with addressing the divinity come from. They’re supplications for some thing. We even say in legal language a particular petition to a court is called a prayer.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, right.
Father Hugh:
The official word for it is a prayer. That is, it’s a word, or privy, tell me. I pray thee, tell me. It wasn’t used just for God at one point. But the point is what we use as the word for prayer now means simply conversation with or contact or communication with God or the saints.
Now, here’s the problem. It’s not that I don’t know how to pray or that I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s that you’re not getting what you want right away or you’re not having the experience that you might have expected to get, given the dignity and the power of the one you’re addressing.
Saint Teresa of Avila, who’s the great doctor of the church because of her teaching on prayer, she talks about this and she says, “We’re very venal beings, we human beings. Ready cash is all we understand.” She says that, “Ready cash is all we understand.” That is when we’re talking to God, we can begin by thinking that I should see immediate results.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right.
Father Hugh:
Instead of how you would approach any other relationship with a person, developing it over time, according to what you know, and what attracts you to this person, and to the questions you have, and all of that.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Father Hugh:
But basically, just take away the word prayer and use any word that expresses a desire, need, enjoyment, consideration, meditation. These are the words that mean the same thing. If you look at it that way, you can pray, because you can think about God. You can desire God and the good things he has to offer. You can wonder about him and all of that, so you’re perfectly capable of praying. You just need to do that for a certain period of time so that you can say, “I prayed,” just like …
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay. Then I suppose that addresses the person who says, “I don’t have time to pray,” as well.
Father Hugh:
Yeah, because that says, “I don’t have time to think. I don’t have time to have any desires or hopes in this life. I have no time for considerations about the future or the past. I have no time to have any inner life.”
I mean, we are constantly praying if you consider that, if you don’t consider the object. We’re constantly considering and meditating on things which either make us happy, or which make us frightened, or make us desire, or make us hope, or make us angry or whatever. We’re constantly thinking about things that affect our emotions and have to do with what we desire to happen and what we desire not to happen. All right.
If we say, “Well, I can’t find time to pray,” well, the fact is you’re constantly praying, but the problem is you’re not directing your attention to the one who is the source of all the other little idols that you’re considering yourself with.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. Right.
Father Hugh:
I mean basically when we think about a television set that we want … That dates me already. It’s not a set. What is it now? What do they call them?
Cy Kellett:
A TV. They just call them a TV, I guess. Yeah.
Father Hugh:
A TV, a big plasma screen.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Father Hugh:
It sounds horrible. It sounds like a living thing. It probably is by now.
Cy Kellett:
Well, it certainly listens to you. They listen to you now.
Father Hugh:
That’s right, exactly. Yes, thank you. You are in a sense taking, giving the service of your mind and your heart to a being that for the moment you perceive as being greater than you, as having something that you need that you can’t get for yourself. You’re interiorly kind of beseeching or wondering about how you can get these good things from this particular object, like this fancy TV or something like that. That is, we naturally tend to set up idols in our imagination. Idol exactly means in Greek something which is seen or imagined.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Father Hugh:
An idol is something seen or imagined. We constantly are seeing or imagining for ourselves beautiful objects, useful objects, sexy objects, tasty objects, powerful objects that we make, they’re eidolon. They’re imaginations that we have. We expect if we go and try to get those things that we’ll receive from them the good things that they have to offer.
The problem is, is that they’re mere idols. That’s why the word idol has a negative connotation, because what it means is something which just is of the imagination. Whereas God, who’s the source of everything that we have and can do and can experience and can hope for, he is the creator of all these things. He’s not merely an idol. He’s not merely someone that can be imagined. In fact, he can’t be imagined. This is where we come to the difficulty, because we can’t make him enter into the tiny constrained categories of our imagination and our memory.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Father Hugh:
Enough so that we’ll go, “Oh, I know. Well, I know where to get that. If I see that again, I’ll know to buy it.” When you’re with God, it doesn’t work that way, because he’s the source of all those things. He’s not an idol. He’s actually the source, the one source. He is goodness itself, and therefore is delightful to see and delightful to possess, but in no way is limited by our own experience.
This is why human beings experience a certain anxiety or panic at the thought of depending upon someone who is not within the limits of their sensible experience. It’s a matter of like-
Cy Kellett:
Yes. How can I?
Father Hugh:
Like your psychotherapist would say about control.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, yeah.
Father Hugh:
We like our idols, because we know what we’re dealing with. If we could have a God who could just give us things that we can imagine or that fall into the category of senses that give us good feelings, or say even bad feelings but it’s within our purview, we can understand them, then that would be the God that we would seek and that’s the God of the pagans and the God of the world, this world, who can give you that kind of stuff if you serve him.
But our God so goes beyond our imagination, our memory, our understanding that he reveals to us mysteries that we could never grasp with our human understanding nor could an angel grasp with his understanding, no matter how great. He promises us that since he is the one good, it says, “No one is good but God alone,” the supreme good that he has to be the one to whom we go in order to seek for anything and has to be the one whose company we keep if we really want to be happy.
You can surround yourself. You can say, “Well, I’m going to say my daily rosary.” Okay. You made that resolution, and this is a very fine resolution. I’m going to say a rosary every day, and maybe by yourself. I mean, it’s nice to say it in a family. It’s nice for a couple to say it together. That’s very good. It’s important. It binds you together, and the devil doesn’t like that, so do that.
But when praying by yourself, just consider as you’re praying, look around the room at all the things that you put there that you like and that are necessary for your comfortable existence. You could do this in a monastery in your cell, or you could do it in your living room, or wherever it is you pray, or your room. Look around and then just say … Especially look at that big plasma TV set, on which you’re watching the rosary scenes probably. But any case, whatever it is so far, so good. It’s okay. But just look at it and say, “Is that going to make me happy? Is that going to make me happy?”
The picture of your family or of your good friends, or an award from your company, or a sports award, or your favorite books, or all these different things. Say, “Are any of these things going to satisfy the desires of my heart utterly or completely?” Well, no. But what I’m doing right now with this rosary … Even make the rosary beads go away, because they’re too pretty and they just disappear and all you have is your 10 fingers. You just do that and say, “Well, what is really … Who is the source, and what is the source of all the goodness that I surround myself with so that I’ll be happy?”
We do. We surround ourselves with nice things that we want to have around us, because we don’t want to be afflicted with a feeling of loss or not being at home. Then when we begin to pray, we realized, well, you know, the only one I’m really at home with is God, because he’s the source of all these things.
A reflection on that will help us to understand that that’s why prayer can seem very dry or unreal to us, but that’s only because our poor little hearts are so unused to stretching themselves to something much greater.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Father Hugh:
Just like with people … I don’t have much experience with this, but let’s say people that really began to work out in earnest. All right. They start with the feeling of, “I don’t think I can do this. I think this is beyond me.”
Cy Kellett:
I just stay with that feeling.
Father Hugh:
Yeah. Well, that’s okay, but that’s … “Fear not those who can destroy the body-”
Cy Kellett:
Exactly.
Father Hugh:
“But rather him who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.” The point is there, yeah, any discipline when it begins is very, very difficult and it has a certain unreality about it, that is the stress of not getting what we want right away. When we pray and it’s dry, or we pray and we’re distracted, or we pray and don’t know anything about the mysteries of the rosary that we’re praying about, so we just don’t know what they mean, we’re tempted not to continue because it doesn’t seem real to us.
Now, as Saint Teresa of Avila says, and I just quoted a minute ago, she says about prayer, “Ready cash is all we all understand.” When you get into your brand new car and you drive around town and you know nothing about mechanics, especially the computerized mechanics now, are you trouble that you don’t know how all this works? No, because it’s giving you an immediate practical result, which you like.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Father Hugh:
So you never doubt it, even though you don’t know anything about it, right? Well, when we pray and we don’t know the deep designs of God, and his infinite wisdom and love for us, and the power he has to change our hearts, this instant or over a long period of time, whatever he wants to do, but the point is when we don’t know that, we can tell ourselves, “Well, there’s no use to this.” You have to say to yourself, “No, that’s because I’m treating my prayer as though it should behave like my brand new Tesla.”
Cy Kellett:
Mercedes. Yeah, right. Oh, I went low with Mercedes.
Father Hugh:
Well, whatever it is you want. It’s not supposed to be something that works for me. You say, “No.” Prayer is something which is meant to open your heart to the will of God, and the will of God is almighty, eternal, all wise, infinite. It’s everything. There is nothing around you could look at that escapes the will of God. Not a snag in the carpet, not a smudge on the window.
Cy Kellett:
Studio glass, yeah.
Father Hugh:
Nothing escapes the will of God. Even the things that he doesn’t will to happen, he at least permits for something else that he wills to happen.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Father Hugh:
Okay, so nothing escapes this, and that is the most powerful thing at all. When you pray sincerely in line with our Lord’s teaching, thy will be done, as you’re considering our Lord’s entry into the world as a little baby born of the Virgin Mary, or his teaching in the temple as a child, or his suffering, the agony of the passion, or his glorious resurrection and his teaching and ascension, if we consider those things, when you consider all of that, we are aligning ourselves with God’s deepest designs and plans, and sure, certain, infallible, powerful will for everything.
You may be concerned that you need a job. Well, certainly pray, but realize that your prayer, if united to that are the mysteries of the life of Christ and the Blessed Mother is about everything whatsoever, that your job has a place in God’s ultimate plan and that when he gets you one … When you have a job, it’s because he got it for you. That’s for sure. Praise the Lord, as they say.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Father Hugh:
All right. When he gets you one, it will be part of his plan and something far more powerful than just surely your immediate anxiety and need, no matter how real that is. You have a family. You have concerns. You’re anxious. Well, God will see to all that. But our prayer, our needs, even our daily needs are dignified, are elevated to the level of things which bring about God’s glory and happiness of the human race. That’s true for everyone you are, if you please.
Cy Kellett:
Just I want to connect it with Mary because of the birthday of Mary coming up. Mary as an exemplar of prayer, what she can kind of teach us about communicating with God through prayer.
Father Hugh:
Absolutely. This month of September has in it a little Marian season, because it has the Feast of Our Lady’s Nativity, her birth on September 8th, and then on the 12th it has the feast of the bestowal of her holy name. Just like at Christmas time we have our Lord’s birth and then we have soon thereafter, after the octave, the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, and those were taken out of the Roman calendar unfortunately. I won’t say by whom or when or anything like that, but they were at least put back by Saint John Paul II. Let me say they were removed by a saint and they were put back by a saint, so even Steven can you say.
Cy Kellett:
Look, Humanae vitae covers a multitude of sins.
Father Hugh:
I suppose, but Our Lady was not interested in that particular question for herself in any case. That’s another issue.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, okay.
Father Hugh:
She’s interested for others, but not for herself. We have a little Marian season there. Of course, coming up in November is the feast of her presentation in the temple when we find her, the little girl going into the temple. Then in December, again, we start the cycle over again with her immaculate conception nine months before her birth on September 8th. The calendar is made that way.
Well, when we say we don’t know how to pray or we can’t find time to pray, which is ridiculous, like saying, “I don’t have time to think. I have no time for anything,” that’s just an excuse. You’re turning prayer into something that it’s not. You’re forgetting what prayer actually is and forgetting who God is.
I have no one to teach me how to pray. Well, that’s different. That’s a problem nowadays. A lot of people have a hard time finding a spiritual director. But there’s plenty of stuff out there to show you how to pray in the literature available everywhere. Certainly Catholic Answers, we’ve got plenty of things available for our readers and watchers about that.
But with Our Lady, she is particularly a teacher of prayer because her existence as the greatest of God’s creatures after Jesus Christ, who is her son, so even though he’s greater than she is, she is in a real sense a principle or a cause of his being a man.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Father Hugh:
Therefore, that’s even … it makes it even more grand, right? She is depicted in the scriptures, and the church applies this to her, as the very wisdom of God working in creation, accomplishing all his designs strongly and sweetly, reaching from end to end. we’ll sing that beautiful antiphon on December 18th in the Roman Rite. “O Wisdom, of God, who came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and sweetly and strongly disposes all things reaching from end to end. Come and show us the way of prudence.”
Prudence is a right judgment of our mind about what we ought to do. Our Lady, the Virgin most prudent, and the seed of wisdom and the wisdom, the created wisdom of God himself will be able to show you how to pray. Go to her first. Ask for her help. Start with her rosary, and even finish with it. If you never pray any other prayers for the rest of your life and you just pray those, just I say, then you will have done all you could possibly do.
Don’t be discouraged by the enormous amount of literature on different forms of prayer. That’s all valuable, and divine providence puts those books in people’s hands who need them, whatnot. But if you, on the other hand, are just simply perplexed and whatnot, then just learn how to pray the rosary. Just start there, and then look around. You can find The Secret of the Rosary by Saint louis de Montfort, or you could find some other beautiful works about a mystical life, like The Cloud of Unknowing, which is ignored a lot but is a very important book about how to pray just simply without the use of the imagination.
There are so many things that we can use, but go to her, because that’s what heaven has said to us over these past hundreds of years. God has not sent instructions about how to pray other than the day to day life of the church, the Liturgy of the Hours, and the sacraments, and the example of our saints. Okay, so that’s all there. But in terms of actual emissaries from heaven, what have we gotten?
Cy Kellett:
Mary.
Father Hugh:
We’ve gotten Mary’s rosary, and we can add-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, the Divine Mercy.
Father Hugh:
The Divine Mercy Chaplet. Well, you know, her son has to have some … He’s got to do something like mama.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, it’s his turn.
Father Hugh:
He’s got to imitate mom a little bit, so he has-
Cy Kellett:
Is that what happened?
Father Hugh:
He came up with something. But in any case. But there you are, and that’s a pretty simple recipe, and it’s all right there. If you start those things, believe me, you will know how to pray as well as anyone prayed. It’ll be good enough for you,, good enough for heaven, and good enough for all your needs, and hopes, and desires, here and above.
Cy Kellett:
Amen. Thank you, Father.
Father Hugh:
You’re welcome. Sure.
Cy Kellett:
I got into a bad habit, Father, and I don’t know how I got into this bad habit. I always ask you for your blessing at the end of the radio program, but we haven’t done it on Focus. I’m not sure why I haven’t done it for Focus, but could we have your blessing?
Father Hugh:
Because it’s not live.
Cy Kellett:
Is that why?
Father Hugh:
That’s probably it, yes.
Cy Kellett:
Should I not do it then?
Father Hugh:
No, it’s fine.
Cy Kellett:
Because your blessing will still be good if someone listens to this a week from now, right?
Father Hugh:
Right. My intention virtually continues when people join me in that prayer.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, good.
Father Hugh:
[Foreign language 00:00:20:40]
Cy Kellett:
Amen.
Father Hugh:
Amen.
Cy Kellett:
I don’t know. For me, a lot of it comes down to trust, having confidence that God is actually listening when we’re including him in the things that we’re already doing, including him in the thoughts, and desires, and hopes of our day. Once we develop that trust, then we can kind of feel like, yes, prayer is working so to speak. It’s always working, because God is always there with us and always helping.
Hey, if you want to get in touch with us, focus@catholic.com is our email address, focus@catholic.com. We want to hear from you. If you want to suggest a future episode, we’d love to hear that as well. Don’t forget to subscribe to Focus so you’ll be notified whenever new podcasts are available. Also, if you’re watching on YouTube, don’t forget like and subscribe. That makes all the difference for us. Like and subscribe over there on YouTube.
If you want to give it to us, it does help. It takes money to produce these podcasts. You can do that over at givecatholic.com. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Thanks so much for joining us. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Calvary Answers Focus.