Lift Up Your Heart

Each Sunday the celebrant invites the praying community to “Lift up your hearts” as we join in the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving at the Lord’s Table. Those of us old enough to remember the catechism in school learned that “prayer is the lifting of the mind and heart to God.”

Each Sunday we come to church to pray. Many pray each day to begin and end the day in God’s Presence. Not infrequently in our Catholic community, we hear “I’ll pray for you” or “please pray for me.” Prayer is something which we all do and is at the center of our spiritual life.

The experience of praying with its blessings and challenges is often at the center of spiritual direction where a believer shares with his or her director ways of praying, difficulties and challenges of prayer, and how they have found God in their spiritual life. Even though prayer is a very common shared experience, it seems to be a perennial, if not a life time, challenge.

Lord, Teach Us to Pray
Most of us easily identify with the disciples when they come to Jesus in the gospels with the request to Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray.” The disciples have been with the Lord, they have prayed with him, and have been taught many other things about his Kingdom. In Matthew and Luke’s gospels, Jesus responds with the Lord’s Prayer. “When you pray, say [our] Father.”

On one level the hearer of the gospel could think that Jesus is teaching them merely a set of words to be used in prayer. Jesus is teaching them much more. The disciples are invited to learn that at the center of prayer is the relationship with the Father. When Jesus prays he identifies and enters into the intimate friendship and love which he has with his Father. The disciples--and we with them--are invited to enter into the Presence of the Father.

Liturgy as School of Prayer
For centuries the liturgy has been the Church’s school of prayer. The words, rituals, and interactions of the worshiping community allow us to pray and, at the same time, show us the ways of prayer. We learn to pray by praying.

We learn that prayer, whether liturgical or personal, involves the whole person.

It is at once physical, mental, emotional, personal, and communal. The believer enters prayer with spoken and heard words, gestures, and actions. It involves speaking, singing, and also moments of silence, reflection, and contemplation.

The liturgy invites us to be attentive to the world around us at worship and thus to discover God. Things and actions which invite us to God:

We sign ourselves with the holy water of baptism. At our entry, we are marked out with the Sign of the Cross: death to life in Christ. At the same time we invoke the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. Attend to the sign, think about it, wonder about the relationships which are offered.

We hear God’s Word, which we embrace in our minds and hearts and which embraces us in the mystery of God around and within us.

We eat and we drink at the Lord’s Table. Through Bread and Wine we discover the Lord with us and the saving mysteries of our life in Christ.

We are physically involved in our prayer. At times we stand to give greater attention to our prayers. Other times we sit to listen and reflect. At still other times kneeling brings us into God’s Presence.

Silence invites us to focus and re-collect ourselves before we pray. Silence also can bring us to greater praise of God. After our words are exhausted, silence allows us to listen to God within us and to be embraced by the God’s Presence.

In personal prayer, we gather our selves into the Presence of God. We need to be still and collected. Sometimes a reading of God’s Word or of a spiritual writer gives us a context of prayer. Prepared or memorized prayers can set the stage for a prayerful experience. Always, we need to make time for God’s speaking and for his action in our lives.

Summertime Invitation
Summertime liturgy is a time to attend to the holy mysteries of Christ’s life among us. Enter the silence, sing the mysteries, reflect on the reality of God among us, and, in contemplation, allow God to embrace us. Suummertime is an invitation to more than recreation, but to genuine re-creation of God within us.

CDH