Hear, Listen, and Pray

Throughout Lent we are constantly invited to pray, to fast, and to give alms. In reality, these are all ways of praying. It is not uncommon to struggle with prayer. We wonder how to pray. We ask about various styles of prayer and the fit with our personalized manner of praying. As Lent continues on, we find that we have met with limited success at this endeavor of praying always and everywhere. Like so many things in Lent, we make ourselves the center of our conversion therapy! In other words, perhaps, we try too hard.

All prayer is God’s gift to us, in which he shows himself to us and in which we discover our relationship with him. It is God who calls us to prayer. It is God who moves our hearts to conversion and change in our Christian life. God searches us out in our life’s journey and moves us to long for him. In our own restlessness with ourselves, we come to learn a remedy in resting and being quiet in him.

An answer to our restlessness is presented before us in the way that the Church is drawn into prayer. The liturgy is the Church at prayer, where God calls us together, speaks to us, moves us to conversion. In the celebration of the Eucharist, we learn how to pray. The Church at prayer is the best school of prayer and spirituality.

Liturgy of the Word
The shape of the Sunday liturgy is a normative shape or form of how we pray. We are so convinced of our own initiatives in prayer that we mistakenly choose whether or not we shall pray. A first perspective with prayer is that we are called together as a community of faith, and that within that Assembly we encounter God through his gracious kindness and mercy. God calls us out of love, forgives us, and shows himself to us. The first encounter with God is in the Word of God itself.

In the three readings at Sunday Mass, we remember the saving deeds of God in history. During Lent, as so often in prayer, we learn of God’s covenantal love and choosing of Israel as his people. That remembrance is in human words and tells of human history and God’s human, but well-loved people. God’s Word and conversation is clothed in our words and seen in his interaction with his People’s response.

In a second reading, we learn of the continued revelation of God in his New Testament communities, where People sought to appropriate his love and express it within their communities. They had encountered Christ, the Son of God. They had seen God’s love in his death and rising to new life.

The Gospel is surrounded with attention, for the Gospel is Christ among us in the remembering and retelling of his ministry, his preaching, his death and rising. The Book of the Gospels is carried from the Table in procession and presented to the Faithful as food and nurture in the community. The Book is held high, it is signed with the Cross, it is proclaimed and heard. The Book if venerated with a holy kiss.

Appropriating the Word
How we appropriate the Word of God at liturgy shows us a way to pray. With our bodies and hearts attentive, we sit and we listen. Just like the gospel, itself, we hear again: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.” Faith comes through hearing. We physically hear with our ears and listen with our hearts. The Word becomes us and we become the Word. The deeds of God gain entrance into our lives through liturgical memory.

Some of the listening is in silence, in which at times we speak and at other times it is God who leads the conversation. Silence, in the end, is the quiet contemplation between two lovers, in which each becomes the other. Prayer then becomes communion.

In very real ways, we appropriate the Word in song and rhythm. The Responsorial Psalm sings God’s Word in his own Word and with that Word the community responds. Sung prayer allows a communion, a voice and heart. It allows a communion of divine and human word.

The end of prayer is not individuality. The reading of God’s Word along with silence and song brings us into the unity or communion of the Body of Christ. The word of God is spoken within the heart of the community. We become what we speak and sing. We become what God initiated with us. Our more personal prayer is no less communion. We come into the mystery of God. In Lent, we become the mystery of God known in the death and rising of the Lord.

CDH