PRAYER
NO word so common and familiar among Christians as prayer. Religion
itself is nothing more than a vast, mighty, universal, never ceasing
prayer. Our churches are monuments of prayer and houses of prayer. Our
worship, our devotions, our ceremonies are expressions of prayer. Our
sacred music is a prayer. The incense, rising in white clouds before
the altar, is symbolical of prayer. And the one accent that is dinned
into
ur ears from altar and pulpit is prayer.
Prayer is the life of the Christian as work is the life of the man;
without one and the other we would starve spiritually and physically.
If we live well, it is because we pray; if we lead sinful lives, it is
because we neglect to pray. Where prayer is, there is virtue; where
prayer is unknown, there is sin. The atmosphere of piety, sanctity, and
honesty is the atmosphere of prayer.
Strange that the nature and necessity of prayer are so often
misunderstood! Yet the definition in our Catechism is clear and
precise. There are four kinds of prayer; adoration, thanksgiving,
petition for pardon, and for our needs, spiritual and bodily.
One need be neither a Catholic nor a Christian to see how becoming it
is in us to offer to God our homage of adoration and thanksgiving; it
is necessary only to believe in a God who made us and who is infinitely
perfect. Why, the very heathens made gods to adore, and erected temples
to thank them, so deep was their sense of the devotion they owed the
Deity. They put the early Christians to death because the latter
refused to adore their gods. Everywhere you go, under the sun, you will
find the creature offering to the Creator a homage of worship.
He, therefore, who makes so little of God as to forget to adore and
thank Him becomes inferior to the very pagans who, sunk in the darkness
of corruption and superstition as they were, did not, however, forget
their first and natural duty to the Maker. Neglect of this obligation
in a man betrays an absence, a loss of religious instinct, and an
irreligious man is a pure animal, if he is a refined one. His
refinement and superiority come from his intelligence, and these
qualities, far from attenuating his guilt, only serve to aggravate it.
The brute eats and drinks; when he is full and tired he throws himself
down to rest. When refreshed, he gets up, shakes himself and goes off
again in quest of food and amusement. In what does a man without prayer
differ from such a being?
But prayer, strictly speaking, means a demand, a petition, an asking.
We ask for our needs and our principal needs are pardon and succor.
This is prayer as it is generally understood. It is necessary to
salvation. Without it no man can be saved. Our assurance of heaven
should be in exact proportion to our asking. "Ask and you shall
receive." Ask nothing, and you obtain nothing; and that which you do
not obtain is just what you must have to save your soul.
Here is the explanation of it in a nutshell. The doctrine of the Church
is that when God created man, He raised him from a natural to a
supernatural state, and assigned to him a supernatural end.
Supernatural means what is above the natural, beyond our natural powers
of obtaining. Our destiny therefore cannot be fulfilled without the
help of a superior power. We are utterly incapable by ourselves of
realizing the end to which we are called. The condition absolutely
required is the grace of God and through that alone can we expect to
come to our appointed end.
Here is a stone. That that stone should have feeling is not natural,
but supernatural. God, to give sensation to that stone, must break
through the natural order of things, because to feel is beyond the
native powers of a stone. It is not natural for an animal to reason, it
is impossible. God must work a miracle to make it understand. Well, the
stone is just as capable of feeling, and the animal of reasoning, as is
man capable of saving his soul by himself.
To persevere in the state of grace and the friendship of God, to
recover it when lost by sin, are supernatural works. Only by the grace
of God can this be effected. Will God do this without being asked? Say
rather will God save us in spite of ourselves, or unknown to ourselves.
He who does not ask gives no token of a desire to obtain.