Four Holy Habits | Daily Prayer

Continuing his series on the Four Holy Habits, Bishop Donald Hying turns to the second habit: daily prayer. At its heart, prayer is communion with God. Bishop Hying looks to the prayer life of Jesus himself, who spent whole nights absorbed in prayer to the Father, as the model for our own prayers. He explores the many forms prayer can take, from the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours to the Rosary, Lectio Divina, meditation, and contemplation, and offers honest encouragement for anyone who struggles to focus or feels they don't know how to pray. His practical advice for beginning: start small, start with the Gospel of Mark, and trust that the Lord will do the rest.

Transcript

Bishop Donald J. Hying 0:00

Welcome to Things Visible and Invisible, a podcast that discusses life, faith, current events, culture, history, and more, all in relation to Jesus Christ and his church. I'm Bishop Don Hying, and today we'll be discussing the importance of daily prayer. As I discussed in the previous podcast, I'm looking at the "Four Holy Habits" that we in the Diocese of Madison have been busily engaged in in a formal way since 2020. So the Four Holy Habits – Mass every Sunday and honoring Sunday as Sabbath, daily prayer, monthly confession, and some form of penance or mortification on Fridays. I'd like to focus in this podcast on the importance of daily prayer. So there's many definitions to prayer. Essentially, it's communion with God. It's going to the Lord, offering our hearts, speaking our heart and soul to Him, pondering His word, offering Him glory and thanks, asking for the forgiveness of sins. There's certainly prayers of petition where we ask the Lord for favors, where we bring him requests for healings and intervention in difficult situations. But ultimately, prayer is communion with the Lord. And the Lord Jesus in his earthly life spent many a night absorbed in prayer to the Father. I've always been intrigued by Jesus' personal prayer life. He is the Son of God, he is one with the Father, and yet in his earthly life he felt the profound and powerful need to give many hours and nights and time to prayer with the Father. We can ask ourselves, what did Jesus' prayer look like? What was he saying to the Father? What was the Father saying to him? I can't help but think that in the end his prayer was a wordless communion, uh resting in the Father's heart. And so when you read the fact that Jesus spent many nights completely absorbed in prayer and then would engage in another day of busy pastoral work of healing and preaching and teaching, you realize that prayer was the Jesus, what sleep is to us. That prayer was the the the source of his energy and led him to the relationship with the Father. I think that helps us understand the importance of prayer for us. That if we are not praying, very quickly, we will run out of spiritual energy, we'll run out of steam. We won't be able to sustain the Christian life because we're not growing in our relationship with God. Any relationship needs time spent together, thoughts and hearts shared, moments that become memorable, where there's a communion of hearts, uh, a kindred of spirits. We certainly see that in marriage where a married couple need to spend time with each other. They need date nights, they need time alone to renew and strengthen their relationship and their commitment. So without communication, a relationship is quickly going to dissolve. So prayer is that moment when we come to the Lord. There's certainly an abundant variety of types of prayer. So we think of the Mass as the perfect prayer. So we have public liturgical prayer. We have the Eucharist at the center of that prayer. We also have the liturgy of the hours, which priests and many religious pray every day, as well as our permanent deacons. So it's a recitation of the Psalms combined with um scriptural readings and petitions that throughout the day we mark time with prescribed prayer. So we we think of those public liturgical prayers as the formal prayer of the church, where the church is coming to the Lord and seeking his blessing, his wisdom as we give him thanks and praise. We also think of devotional prayer. So we think of the Rosary, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the chaplet of divine mercy, of various novenas, litanies. There's an abundance of different devotions where we come to the Lord or we're asking for the intercession of a particular saint, and again, lifting our hearts and minds to God in prayer. We think of Lectio Divina, which is taking a scripture passage, prayerfully, reading over it several times, ref reflecting on that passage, and then really asking ourselves in the Holy Spirit, is there a word, an image, a phrase that stands out for us that the Lord is asking us to go deeply into today? So what is that? So to spend more time kind of spiritually mulling that over. What is the Lord saying to me in this passage, in this moment, in the particulars of my life? And then to make some sort of resolution when we come out of that prayer. You know, what am I going to do today differently? How can I live even a little differently because of this time spent in Lectio Divina? So the ancient fathers and mothers of the church, as well as many contemplatives and religious, many people in the church do Lectio Divina, which means holy reading or spiritual reading, but always focused on the scriptures. How do we allow the Word of God to permeate our hearts and minds? And we think of mental prayer where we come before the Lord and meditate. So meditating is putting our psychological, emotional, and spiritual focus on a particular passage in scripture, perhaps, perhaps a particular image of the Lord, think of the sacred heart, perhaps on a particular theme in our faith, to do mental prayer is to uh allow the Lord to unveil for us uh a deepening of some mystery of our faith or some aspect of his identity and presence. And we think of contemplation, which goes further where the mystics would tell us there comes a point where meditation is no longer satisfying, and we're felt drawn to simply rest in the Lord's heart. So when I think of Jesus' prayer life with the Father, he certainly was the greatest and most perfect contemplative ever. So contemplation leads us kind of into that sacred place deep within where our prayer becomes wordless, where it's not so much us doing the heavy lifting in prayer, but us simply being absorbed into God's presence. So St. John of the Cross would say the senses, in essence, need to be calmed down and purified. And then as we go through the night of the senses, the Lord is going to purify our spirit as well. Those are deep things that perhaps are hard for us to understand. But I think all of us, I can certainly relate to this, we sit down to pray and we're trying to focus, and then suddenly our minds are distracted. We're thinking of 20 other things. We push those distractions away. Uh for a few moments we're focused, distractions come back. And pretty soon I'm sitting there thinking about the fact that I'm sitting there trying to pray. It's like a hall of mirrors. And in that moment, perhaps it's only in that moment that prayer becomes possible. Because in the end, it's not us doing the work of prayer as much as the Father in Jesus through the Holy Spirit praying in us. So when I come to that place of poverty where I realize I cannot pray, that my mind is too small to absorb God, that my hands are too short to reach Him, it's in that moment when I surrender to the Lord and say, Lord, I cannot pray. You must pray within me. Lord, I hand my spirit over to you. I trust in you, I love you. Then the Lord can work in us, in the power of the Holy Spirit and in Jesus, certainly, to enter into that prayer. So the daily habit of prayer is essential if we are serious about our discipleship in the Lord, to grow in our communion with Jesus, to come to a deepening of the scriptures, to expand our devotional life, to bring to the Lord all of our struggles, our joys, our heartaches, our petitions. He loves to hear from us. So no matter how we begin to pray, even if it's just for a few minutes, the importance of a daily practice of prayer is essential if we seek to grow in the spiritual life. And we can be very distracted and busy. Maybe it means getting up 15 minutes earlier, maybe it means creating a sacred, silent place in the corner of some obscure room in the house where we can have some peace and quiet. But if the Lord is calling you to a deeper life of prayer, and he is, then respond to that. There's a thousand different ways we can pray. But when somebody asks me, How should I start? I always say, start with Mark's gospel. Mark's gospel is the shortest, it's the simplest. And just pray it sequentially. So pick one paragraph per day, pray over it, meditate on it. What is it that the Lord is saying to you in this passage? Let that permeate your heart and spirit, and then make some resolution, some determination of action when you come out of that prayer. I think if we even commit to five minutes of prayer a day, eventually the Lord is going to expand our heart to make that longer and longer. So there's many people that do holy hours, and that calls to mind the power of Eucharistic adoration, so that when we go before the Lord in the Eucharist, we are coming face to face with the fullness of Christ present in the living bread of life. There's many people that commit to one hour, one holy hour a week in contemplation before the Eucharist. And you may begin that process thinking, how am I going to fill an hour? Those who have done it for a long time say the hour flies because the Lord just leads us into prayer. So if you don't feel like you know how to pray, just start with Mark's gospel. Go to Eucharistic Adoration. Learn how to pray the rosary. Do a devotional litany. Talk to God in your own words. Doesn't matter how we start, if we're faithful, the Lord is going to lead us to an ever-deepening relationship with Him and a more profound understanding of what He is saying in our lives and of the beauty and power of our faith. The Lord tells us to pray always, and we can certainly do our activities in a prayerful spirit, but in the end, we need that time of prayer each day, even if it's short, even if we're busy, to give that time to the Lord. And it's there that we will speak to him, but more profoundly, it is there that he will speak to us,