Formal Prayer and How It's Done

In my history as a Christian (which, by my reckoning, only began in November 2004) my prayer life has always been pretty weak. I'm sure somebody out there had a worse prayer life than I did. But that doesn't somehow make my lackluster commitment to prayer somehow better.

As with a lot of other things, I blame this on evangelicalism. The reason for that is because evangelicalism places so much emphasis on extemporaneous prayer (nonsensical babbling, in most cases) and an abject lack of training on how to pray combined with a rejection of traditions (*cough* Catholic Church *cough*) which emphasize formal prayers. So it's maybe no wonder that my prayers were so pathetic and so infrequent.

This is another snowflake in a blizzard of practices and norms suggested by the Catholic Church which the Church then empowers you to do.

In my case, I'm still working on my Marian devotions. It's just not as good as it might be. But my prayers in general are a lot stronger now thanks to the Church-provided prayers to believers. I've got an app on my phone and iPad which contains basically every formal prayer the Church has authorized. Of those, I've bookmarked ten:

Glory Be

Our Father

Act of Contrition

Hail Mary

Alma Redemptoris Mater

Morning Prayer

Golden Arrow

Morning Offering

Magnificat

Nicene Creed

What I've noticed is that praying formal prayers first puts me into a prayerful rhythm where I can then pray extemporaneously (which evangelicals put so much emphasis on) and pray to God, Our Lady or the saints.

And hey, the fact is that you don't always have some pressing need to request or some aggravating sin to confess or some dire emergency going on. Sometimes you can just kneel and pray the formal prayers; worship God or thank Our Lord for His sacrifice or praise Our Lady for her obedience. You don't always have to request something and THAT'S OKAY. It's perfectly acceptable to just praise God's holiness and perfection without asking for something in return. And if you're doing okay right now, fine. Worship and adore, and then be on your way.

But when you need more, you've now got a basic foundation to build on to put your will in line with God, to focus your spirit on the Sacred Heart, to immerse your soul in the Spirit.

As a result, I pray the above prayers each morning before work and it really does alter the trajectory of the day. Whatever was going to happen... well, maybe it'll still happen, maybe it won't. But either way, I'm now in a better spiritual headspace to cope with it.

I don't want this blog to became an anti-evangelical rant but sometimes it's hard to not feel just a little torqued off about how misled I was all those years.