Prayers and devotions for the spiritual journey

2014

Curator: Beppe Amico

PRAYERS AND DEVOTIONS

For the spiritual journey

Ega&book

Premise

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We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. (Mother Teresa of Calcutta).

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From Wikipedia, the interactive encyclopedia: Prayer is an invocation or act that seeks to activate a rapport with a deity, an object of worship, or a spiritual entity through deliberate communication. Prayer can be a form of religious practice, may be either individual or communal and take place in public or in private. It may involve the use of words or song. When language is used, prayer may take the form of a hymn, incantation, formal creed, or a spontaneous utterance in the praying person. There are different forms of prayer such as petitionary prayer, prayers of supplication, thanksgiving, and worship/praise. Prayer may be directed towards a deity, spirit, deceased person, or lofty idea, for the purpose of worshipping, requesting guidance, requesting assistance, confessing sins or to express one's thoughts and emotions. Thus, people pray for many reasons such as personal benefit or for the sake of others. Most major religions involve prayer in one way or another.

In accordance with ascetics the real prayer flows deep from the heart and it’s the one that touches God himself. It’s like a bridge between us and God, and allows us to communicate with Him in various ways till getting to the mystical marriage.

Again from Wikipedia: According to catholic creed, when a man prays he consciously rises to God, or he chooses to voluntarily communicate and share his troubles, worries, joys, sorrows, achievements and failures with God.

In this book I collected the most famous and widespread prayers of catholic tradition. Those are the same I’ve been using in my own spiritual meditation. Some are so beautiful and so intimate that are like gems, and they are able to make us raise and progress in our own path to perfection. I wish that they could become a tool of loving and sharing for you as well as they’ve already been for many people.

        The curator

Various typology of praying

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There are several ways of praying. Let’s have a deep look:

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1) Demanding or interceding prayer: God is called via an emissary or intermediary. The Virgin Mary is the major and best known intermediary to godlike grace. Every grace and mercy that God sends to their children is getting through her hands. There are other intermediaries as well such as the saints, the angelic spirits including our guardian angel, the dead or living in God’s grace. We need to clarify the last statement though, as for dead we are talking about the Purgatory souls which are paying for their sins and debts with divine justice. They can intercede for us still living on Earth but they can’t do anything for themselves. That’s why the Catholic Church asks to pray for their suffrage, since purgative souls can do many things for us from their dwelling of sorrow and suffering, but they are going to do even more when, thanks to our prayers, they would cross the Paradise threshold, something they covet and desire more than anything else. 

2) Laud prayer: it’s a prayer of praise and adoration, done to magnify the greatness of our God, his goodness, his mercy, his love for the creation, his justice, and to recognize our own pitiful state of needful man seeking for his help and his support during the winding path of our earthly existence. 

3) Thanksgiving prayer: this prayer comes from those who want to thank God for his blessing and for granting healing and delivering graces, for giving resolutions in arguments and conflicts in our own family or in society. Saint Teresa of Avila loved to give thanks to God for according goods and spiritual graces. She said: We don’t really know how many things our Lord allows to those who follow the holiness path. And this little we have to offer is nothing compared to the great things he gives to us.

The Blessed Virgin Mary at Medjugorje confirms that it’s due to pray for ourselves and for the others if we want to achieve the fullness life, which we can only get in God and in his goodwill. In many Marian apparition, the Virgin Mary reminded us that too many souls got lost because there’s no one to look over them, to sacrifice and pray for them. 

As a matter of fact, we are all united in the same destiny, the entire humanity cooperates, without even knowing it, to achieve God’s plan. Every good action concur on raising the general spiritual well-being, as every bad action put it down. So we are all in charge in different ways to the world’s destiny as well as our own destiny. Glory or damnation, joy or misery, they are all due to us and our own choices.

At the end we mention some schools of prayer and especially the mystics ones, whose really understood how to pray, thanks to their fruitful holiness path. Thanks to their directions and their experience we can also rise and improve, and start our own holiness path as well, looking for a priceless goal: the reward for the elected and the glory of Heaven.

Many saints and doctors of the Church, including Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Teresa of Avila, based their prayer on mental oration, a deep contemplation of God’s beauties in which you can find the infinite tenderness of his goodness.

Let’s have a deep look to Teresa of Avila’s school. In this regard I am going to report what I wrote on a previous book of mine: The Spanish mystic bases her doctrine on meditation and spirituality which ensue from contemplations and intellectual and sensitive visions of the mystical kind.

The Modus operandi is quite simple and actually good for everyone. But as long as this method is not build on special knowledge and therefore attainable by every person who wish to practice it, it does lead to considerable results only if our own personality is based on a solid foundation of succeeding and being able to give up on bad habits and wickedness to practice virtue.

Saint Teresa compares the soul to a garden or a castle with a variety of tasks which are like the spiritual progress during the path to the journey to God.

She suggests to imagine that we were assigned to plant and cultivate any sort of flowers and plants in this garden, the same plants Our Lord is going to enjoy when he would come visiting us. 

This garden is like a wasteland at the start but then, while we work to embellish it and making it beautiful, it will become something really unique.

The similarity makes a really good point if we think that the wild soil Saint Teresa is talking about is our soul before going through the spiritual path and the weeds to stub out are the bad habits deep-rooted in ourselves that we need to root out from our hearts even with great sacrifices. The beautiful and scented flowers are like the virtues that we need to reach out in order to come in touch with the King (God), making our garden worthy and deserving such an important visit.

Saint Teresa makes a list of five categories of mental prayer:

1) Mental prayer through intellect, which concentrates its attention to a sacred theme such as a passage from the Gospel, an episode of Jesus life, etc. trying to connect with God in a silent dialogue. 

2) The second step on mental prayer consists in a supernatural motion where the soul, still working and talking with mind, is getting less tired on establishing a spiritual communion with God, essentially occurring by inner assertions.

3) The third step initiates through the contemplation of divine mysteries and, as the saint explains, it’s an operation performed by God himself making us unconscious and lifting up the soul’s higher powers, establishing a real dialogue made of contemplation, intellectual visions, imaginary and inner expressions.  

4) The fourth step is lifting up the soul even more to next stage of contemplation of those heavenly beauties and the supernatural love of Trinity, a prelude to unity oration which is the last step in Saint Teresa’s method.

5) In this last spiritual step the soul indeed connect with God in his intimacy through its highest powers, celebrating a spiritual wedding which was the endeavor of many charismatic and mystical figures in Catholic Church.

Saint Teresa’s spirituality is founded on discipline and a strong resolution to go through the sometimes rough path of faith, to reach the greatest good of all which is owning God on Earth already.

Why to pray

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Prayer is unity between the men and God. It’s the simplest way to get in touch with Him to ask for help or support, or to give thanks or praise him when obtaining a grace. 

The exegetes and mystics, whose really experienced on effectiveness on praying God, promise that prayer is essential to maintain the soul’s spiritual needs. Those who pray recognize their own weakness and that they have no power in themselves but in God. Even Jesus Christ, saint and flawless, while in front of God was constantly praying to ask for help to his Father, so we, miserable and breakable creatures, need to pray our Lord to ask for help during our rough journey through holiness.

Praying is an act of humbleness which is appreciated by God who, as we know, gives everything to those who pray him with dedication and modesty.

Prayer is not always humble though. Quite often it’s dry, off, sometimes opinionated, soaked in materialism (prayers on demanding) and even daring and this is why those asking often don’t obtain things that they were expecting.

Quite often men don’t have the ability to pray well or they don’t pray as they should and it looks like their supplication are left unheard. It is quite important to highlight that it’s due to pray God for the right question and to get those things that we can’t get with our human powers.

Perhaps asking grace for healing a suffering sick person is the most common prayer but maybe the less fulfilled as well. Why?

There are some elements that go along with praying: 

1) Faith, or the intensity of trust and abandonment we ask for a grace to God. If we don’t have faith in God fulfilling our requests, it would be hard to obtain the grace. As a witness of fact we can recall what Jesus was telling to those who were healed by his miracles during his passage in Palestine: Your faith saved you, or You are forgiven since you loved deeply.

2) The object and the motif of requesting, which should be sticking to God’s will. 

This topic is really tricky since we can’t really know the divine plan, but we can guess it thanks to grace and our natural talents. In this field it’s always necessary to act with judgment and really understand what God really welcomes. To clarify any doubt we know that this higher knowledge is given from the fruit produced by the tree. Do you remember what was Jesus telling to the apostles? From the tree you will recognize the fruits. It is important to ask for those things that are doing well to our soul and our body. This won’t mean that we can’t ask for material things though. We are warned that those material thing will come to us just if they will concur to our moral and spiritual edification.

We pray to obtain approval and kindness from God so that our existence raise in grace and knowledge for a purpose: sanctification for us and for our brothers.

St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, eminent Neapolitan religious man from the 19th century, warned: Those who pray will save themselves, those who don’t will be damned, meaning that praying is necessary to reach the eternal joy. Those who don’t pray deprive themselves from graces which are much needed to realize God’s plan on us, and they are in danger to pick up a wrong path. It is true that God wants all of us to be saved, but this depends pretty much on our free will and the choices we do during our lives. Not to pray means we trust just in ourselves. Our fragility and weakness make us do the wrong things. We could avoid the mistakes we commit during our journey on Earth if we humbly call on God, asking for support and help during the hard times of our lives.

Thoughts and notes about praying

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In this chapter there will be a short report about the saint’s thoughts about praying. Some interesting notes written by mystics and Catholics of all times.

«Prayer is the spine in my torments» (Saint Pio of Pietrelcina).

«Praying is calming the soul’s perturbations, soothing anger, driving away envy, turning off greed, decreasing and withering the attachment to material goods, providing the spirit with a deep peacefulness... » (Saint John Chrysostom). 

«Praying means joining God’s will, declaring ourselves as God’s servant: putting the Gospel in practice, understanding its logic» (Antonio Bello). 

«First you need to do the sign of the cross, then the examination of conscience, and then you act the Confiteor. And then, since you are alone, you need to look for a company. And is there anything better than the one from the Master that taught you the prayer you are going to declaim? So imagine he is right there near to you, considering love and humility he trained you with» (Saint Teresa of Avila – Cam. 26, 1). 

«My oration method was all about doing anything I could to keep Jesus Christ, our Good and Lord, inside my mind. If I was thinking about a scene from his life,