Considering Liturgical Prayer

Back when I first began considering membership with the Catholic Church, if you'd told me that formalized prayer would come naturally, I'd have said you were crazy. I would've assumed that, of all decidedly Catholic practices, that would be the hardest thing to get into.

The above is what you might call "leading the witness" in a court of law. It's a standard practice in a lot of writing. The goal is to produce an unexpected dramatic reversal of what went previously in order to entice the reader to continue reading.

But oddly enough, I've gathered a few formalized that interest me and have begun praying those most mornings with surprising ease.

In terms of unexpected dramatic reversals, how am I doing so far?

Specifically these prayers are the Our Father, Act of Contrition, Hail Mary, Alma Redemptoris Mater and the Apostles' Creed. I chose them either for their frequent appearances in the liturgy or else because they're devotionals that are new and mostly unfamiliar to me but which I still feel I should make a priority.

The results have been as amazing as they have been immediate. These prayers first thing in the morning have so far really changed how I go about my days. I feel a noticeably stronger sense of peace at most times during the day. Now, it feels inappropriate to me to discuss feeeeeeeeelings because they can't be weighed, measured, quantified or even reliably reproduced. What I feel to be a sense of peace relative to my usual state could be a heightened sense of anxiety for some people or a horse tranquilizer for others.

Still, I have to acknowledge that there is room for an individual's personal experience in this. I'm usually reluctant to discuss these things in public though because my fear is being lumped in with those Emerging Church types. Still, I can't really discuss the efficacy of formalized prayer as practiced by the Catholic Church without mentioning my own personal experience with it. So please don't take this as the Emergent brand of oohey-gooey "spirituality" I so detest.

Now, I can't speak for anybody else but I at least don't get to make decisions on my own. Nope. Invariably I have to deal with a committee of rubes, pretenders and pseudo-intellectuals telling me why I'm wrong, hopeless, misguided, heretical or whatever else about anything I choose to do. Be it choices made in my professional life, love life, schooling, hobbies, choice of friends or anything else, there'll always be some jackass who just can't wait to tell me why I'm wrong.

In the case of Catholicism, it's an evangelical with some severely goofed up theology. We'll call him "Donald Bell". On the one hand, "Donald Bell" is a member in exceedingly good standing of a Southern Baptist church. On the other hand, his views and theology owe far more to the aforementioned Emerging Church brand of spiritual pap.

A great many of our conversations regarding religion that don't involve anti-Catholic myths and canards tend to revolve around the false dichotomy of formalized prayer vs. the pure heart and soul of (supposedly) non-liturgical forms of Christianity.

In the first place, I've come to realize that every brand of Christianity has some kind of liturgy. In a sense, what really separates the Catholics from the Baptists is that the Church is willing to put their liturgy in writing while the Southern Baptist Convention is not.

In the second place though, as I said, it's a false dichotomy. The mere fact that some Catholics "go through the motions" of formalized prayer tells me they don't understand the formalization or the prayer. That can't accurately be said of the Church at large though:

2700 Through his Word, God speaks to man. By words, mental or vocal, our prayer takes flesh. Yet it is most important that the heart should be present to him to whom we are speaking in prayer: "Whether or not our prayer is heard depends not on the number of words, but on the fervor of our souls."
-- Catechism of the Catholic Church

Mind you, that doesn't keep "Donald Bell" from leveling the accusation. But it simply isn't true. Further, it assumes that there's no room for extemporaneous prayer, which is just ignorant.

The other thing though, and again this relies on my personal experience, there's simply no comparison between my prayer life now and my prayer life as a Southern Baptist. To be fair, I've only committed to morning prayers over the last week or thereabouts so it's a pretty lopsided comparison. Still, the formal prayer schedule has been easy to abide by and spiritually beneficial for me. "Donald Bell" has frequently said (in approved Emerging Church fashion, I'm certain) that "nobody can argue with personal experience".

I'm very well aware of how anemic my prayer life was before I joined the Catholic Church. As much as I came to admire the Anglican church during 2013, all they really did was change how I viewed my worship. It was a radical change, to be sure, but it wasn't the complete spiritual tune-up I've gotten from the Catholic Church. As a Southern Baptist, prayer was usually what I did during moments of stress and crisis, or else it was done as I was falling asleep each night. Now it's become a vital and indispensable part of my spiritual life.

That's MY personal experience so by his own logic, which should be checkmate with "Donald Bell".

But I doubt it will be.

More to follow.