The Third Hour of Prayer…

 So I was quite willing when said friend turned to me (as we left the Adoration Chapel at 4 am) and asked if I was up for ‘the third hour’ of prayer as her husband calls it.  You. Betcha.  During a recent natural disaster, a local church refused to accept supplies from my friend’s Catholic parish simply because they were from Catholics.  Since it can be difficult to fall asleep after Adoration anyway, my friend has taken to spending an hour in prayer for this Church.  We piled into the car, swung through Whataburger for a breakfast sandwich to eat on the way, and headed for the third hour.

In the quiet of the car, we took out our rosaries and began to pray the Luminous mysteries.  The rosary is a meditation on the life of Christ, luminous mysteries being specifically the major events in our Lord’s ministry.

So these were a particularly appropriate meditation to pray for unity in service to our Lord with these, our brothers and sisters in Christ. As the street lights formed pools of clarity in the early morning darkness, our voices rose into the silence with the rhythm of prayer.  I meditated upon each event in the life of Our Lord, praying the words of the Angelic Salutation and asking God to accept her fiat as mine, that intimate communion with God returning.  The prayerful chorus of our voices invited our Lord into our midst and He came, and listened, and taught…

My memories are imperfect… and incomplete… some insight is not given for us… to be scribbled on the back of stray bits of paper, meditated on and shared, but to assist us in prayer… as our Lord participates and guides our prayer, bringing it into line with His will.  This was that sort but I wanted to save what I do remember as everything He gives is precious.

Luminous Mysteries

1. The Baptism of the Lord

As I meditated upon the Baptism, I realized yet again what being ‘Christ-like’ means.  It means that God came and LIVED as our example. He showed us HOW to respond by HIS response. He was baptised not because He needed to be cleansed of sin, but to fulfill all righteousness… and that is an example to us.  We need to respond in such a way as to fulfill all righteousness…   He humbled Himself and walked among those who were weak, needy, sinful… an imperfect reflection of Himself.  How can we refuse to do likewise?

2. The Wedding of Cana

In the Wedding at Cana, a need was brought to Jesus attention by His mother.  The wine was gone and the wedding feast far from over.  He asked what she would have Him to do… it was not yet His time.  She turned and gave instructions, her very entrusting of the servants to Him an act of faith, belief, and persistence.  What did He tell them? I told her no? He honored the request of His mother. He was humble. He saw the need and met it, even though the timing was not the best.  How often to I let convenience determine my willingness to serve?

3. The Proclamation of the Kingdom

4. The Transfiguration

5. The Institution of the Eucharist.

Bread. Wine. Simple food. Brought by sinful men, held in imperfect hands, shared even by a traitorous friend.  What did our Lord do? He took it, blessed it, broke it, perfected it, shared it… and in doing  so, gave Life. The bread and wine, like the prefiguring loaves and fishes, was useful to our Lord… not because of the perfect hearts and right belief of those who brought it, not because it was an adequate offering… the apostles themselves thought it insignificant and unworthy… but because of the perfect heart and holiness of He to whom it was given by faith. Our Lord repeatedly took imperfect gifts and sanctified them, made them holy, multiplying them, and using them to bless… to give Life.  Who then are we to refuse the gift of another made in our Lords name and to our Lords sheep, no matter how blemished, imperfect, unclean the heart of the giver in our eyes? Is it not a lack of faith on our part? Just as the apostles lacked faith that God could do anything worthwhile with a few simple loaves and fish?

As the temple became a car once again and the harmony of our voices died away, I realized a few things… First, that voices risen in prayer, glorifying our Lord, was something precious… it was as though I’d been given a very veiled glimpse of what it must be like to raise one’s voice in the throne room continuously in the Holy, Holy, Holy… never tiring, just being renewed and filled with joy and never ending love… not boring as it always sounded to me as a child… and that it would be a wondrous thing to be able to do that one day in heaven.  Secondly, that I was praying not only for that church, but for all Christians… for myself… knowing myself guilty and praying that I would be given grace to not be found lacking in faith, doubting God’s ability  to transform even the simplest things given by the most corrupt appearing heart, incapable of judging rightly the heart of another before our Lord… but trusting that God can use even the Samaritans of our acquaintance… to do His work.

Arriving back at the house, I climbed the stairs with a silly grin on my face to climb back in bed … a third hour… who knew… I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

A Family Rosary…

Tonight we began to pray a rosary daily as a family.  It was something my husband had mentioned wanting to do to the children. They mentioned it to me, not knowing that I had  also been wanting to begin doing this, and so it began. 

We used Scriptural Rosary books, the same ones we used in our old parish to pray the communal rosary every Wednesday.  At the end, my husband told me that wasn’t a traditional rosary.  Ha. I told him that if by ‘traditional’ he meant not ‘just a mantra of Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s without even mentioning the mysteries’ (and he admitted that is what he meant) then no, it wasn’t. It was better. He did like it though, so it’s ok. 

 One of the girls wanted to pray another set of mysteries, and I’m glad that she enjoyed it that much, but we told her it would wait until tomorrow.  I want them to keep enjoying it and overdoing it the first night won’t help.  Still, it was a good start. 

There is something special about praying together in community.  There is also something special about praying together as a family.  The chorus of our daughters young voices raised with the deep tones of their father in prayer is a precious thing.  These are precious days together.

Rosary: Mysteries, Meditations, and the Telling of the Beads (Part 1)

This book by Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D. was recommended to me by a friend who said “This is a MUST buy! RUN, don’t walk, RUN to Amazon…” and so I did. She is rarely wrong about such things.  I began it shortly before leaving on the two week interview odyssey with my family (husband is changing jobs) and continued to read it between my spousal obligations at each interview location. While far from finished, I must admit to being grateful the highlighter I’m using is a fresh one… certainly it is getting a LOT of use.

The book is divided into ‘chapters’ but they are not numbered, being differentiated instead by their title.   I begin here with the ‘chapter’ titled The Fertile Ground.  While it is all excellent, I’m just sharing some bits that really jumped out at me for one reason or another and read as a whole it flows much better than hacked into such ‘bits’.

The Fertile Ground

Conversion* is a turning of the heart toward God, which means that the heart has to turn away from the quick and the transient satisfactions of this world in favor of its birthright, which is everlasting reunion with God (Gn 25:29-34).

So from earliest times monks and nuns often sang psalms.  Sometimes they sang all hundred and fifty psalms, and sometimes they chose certain ones appropriate to the intentions of their prayers; but either way they all used psalms as a basis for meditative prayer – “I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the understanding also; I will sing with the spirit, but I will sing with the understanding also”, as St. Paul advised (1 Cr 14:15-16). And they added standard prayers like the Kyrie after each, no matter what arrangement of psalms they sang. Historians like Eusebius, John Cassian, and, long before them, St. Paul himself (Eph 5:19; Cl 3:16) testify that the laity, too, established the Psalter as the basis of their private devotions very early in the Church’s history.  Day and night, the people flocked to the oratories of the monasteries and convents to participate in those devotions, and they were certainly welcome; the communal prayers of monastic communities are above all the prayers of the whole Church for the whole Church, and for the salvation of the whole world. In fact, the monks didn’t just admit people who happened by; they invited the laity to join in.  By the turn of the fifth century St. Porphyrius of Gasa had already added an invitatorium to the psalmodic prayers of the monks in his diocese; he put Psalm 94 – Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord – at the beginning of the devotions, and there it has stayed ever since across Christendom.  The Mozarabic Rite still calls this sonus, because it’s sung while the bells are being rung to summon people to prayer, and since at least the time of Charlemagne the rubrics in Europe have specified that it should be sung slowly, to give people enough time to get there.

Still, plenty of people could read, in the Middle Ages. In fact, the Book of Psalms was the basic textbook that the Church used to teach people to read.  And the practice is as old as Scripture itself – it’s why Psalms 110, 111, and 118 are arranged as little alphabet-books for Hebrew children.  The real problem was that before the invention of printing nobody could figure out how to make enough copies of the liturgical books so that everybody who could read could use one.  We sometimes forget that mediaeval Europe didn’t even have paper; a single sheet of parchment or vellum costs the life of a farm animal, not to mention weeks of preparation.  Even today good ink is costly, brewed by hand.  Manuscripts took years to copy, and they were unbelievably expensive.  A Psalter was worth a farm and a Bible a whole village.

To understand Mt 6:7 clearly, you have to go back to the Church’s Bible, which was the only Bible in existance when the King James commission started working on their own version.  The original Greek… In it’s classical sense… means “to stammer”, and it’s also used to mean to chatter any empty, meaningless sound.  Eustathius, the twelfth-century bishop of Thessalonika – who certainly knew his Gospel – used it in his commentary on Homer to refer to the twittering of birds.  Either way, the word doesn’t mean saying the same thing over and over; it means hemming and hawing, babbling meaninglessly instead of saying what you want to say, or just not getting to the point…. In the Latin Bible… nolite multum loqui just means “don’t talk a lot; don’t run off at the mouth; don’t rattle on like the pagans do: get to the point” – exactly what the Greek means…. So Mt 6:7 is a warning against confusing quantity witih quality; “first of all,” St. Augustine said, “Our Lord excluded loquaciousness” (Sermon 56:4).  Christ advised against twittering and talking too elaborately, which is a different thing entirely from repeating the same prayers over and over.  In fact – like pious people in the Old Testament (1 Kn 12) – he himself spent whole nights in prayer; he himself repeated what he said time and again (Mt 26:44), and he himself said that repeated prayers work even beyond the claims of justice (Lk 11:5-8, 18:1-8; cf. Jm 5:16-17; 3 Kn 17-18).

The simple answer to the objection, then, is that proper repetitions of vocal prayers aren’t vain, in either sense of the word. The words of vocal prayer are not meaningless – it’s a fault to babble them out without paying any attention to them (Mr 7:6), but words have meaning and, because the human mind operates in terms of language, words have power, the power to change the way you think.  If you repeat the words automatically, you’ve wasted this power, and you’e missed the point of vocal prayer, which is after all communication that asks for an answer.

If you’re saying it right, you can’t say it often enough; and if you’re saying it wrong, it doesn’t matter how often you say it.

But beyond that an objection to the repetition of vocal prayer in devotions like the Rosary misses the point, precisely because these vocal prayers are repeated as a way to achieve a state of clear meditation, a lively regard of God or of some aspect of God: he who only follows words has nothing, but he who possesses his own mind cares for his soul (Pr 19:7-8). Repetitions aimed at that goal can appear vain only to those who have not been taught the skill of meditative prayer.

If we’re working with our hands on earthly things, Richard Rolle asked in the fourteenth century, “what is to keep us from working with our hearts on heavenly things?”

… the laity across Europe had the habit of praying as they worked, too…. They counted their prayers by means of little stones, or they knitted those prayers together with a length of string, a circlet of cord knotted or strung with beads.

In fact, our English word “bead” really means “prayer”.

It’s also why the venerable St. Bede, the eighth-century English writer, was named that; his name means prayer.

For the word to enter our language as it did, the Angles must have used beads almost exclusively for counting prayers, and the Saxons must have worn their strings of prayer beads around the waist – the Saxon word for prayer is belt.

….the modern Rosary itself, lay far in the future in the year 800. But by then all the elements were there: the Faithful throughout Christendom, lay and clerical alike, were regularly practicing meditative prayer; they were structuring their meditations on the repetitions of vocal prayers anchored to the Lord’s own prayer, the Our Father; they added the Angelic Salutation after each Pater noster, and they counted these vocal prayers on beads, after the pattern of the psalms, grouping them in fifties for a total of a hundred and fifty.

 Some of these ‘bits’ were things that rang true from past experience… others were things that connected for the first time in a rapid fire chain and left me saying ‘duh, of course!’ such as the meaning of the word bead and how it translated to the name of the Venerable Bede (which I got before the book made the connection for me).  As much as I have appreciated the Rosary these past two years, this book (along with Hail Holy Queen by Scott Hahn) has helped me realize that I have only scratched the surface and that there is so much more to the beads I hold in my hand than I realize… and so much more that God can teach me through this devotional form of prayer.  Again the joy of new discovery breaks over me, the knowledge that no matter how long I live or how much I devote myself to the faith, the feast that God has brought me to in the Catholic Church is large enough to sustain me, fresh as though newly prepared and yet two thousand years old with wisdom that God has protected through the ages, simple enough to minister to my youngest child and yet rich and complex enough to satisfy the most discerning adult.  How thankful I am that God had not created within me a hunger for more of Himself that He did not intend to satisfy, and how I rejoice as He shares glimpses of what lies ‘further up and further in’.

*Many people use the word ‘convert’ when speaking in terms of a move from the Protestant arena to the Catholic Church.  This use does not accurately reflect what has happened however.  The proper term would be ‘reconciled’… so and so ‘reconciled’ to the Catholic Church.  This would be true regardless of whether or not they had ever been Catholic before.  The word ‘conversion’ in the Catholic faith refers to the ongoing process of the Christian walk, the Christian life. A cycle containing both  God’s saving grace (and other graces) and our loving response to Him through our prayers and Acts of Mercy, whether spiritual or corporeal, which changes or ‘converts’ us – our habits, desires, tendencies, thought processes, etc – into more Christ-like people. 

Music to my ears…

Precious (dd 11 yrs) has been having a very hard time lately. I may have mentioned it previously.  She has been spending a minimum of 1.5 hours in prayer a day praying a Consecration Rosary.  It is something she does out of necessity, but it has born fruit beyond herself. 

As I finished typing up the second Merton post, and even now, I can hear the sweet and stumbling words of Sunshine (dd 8 yrs old) from down the hall where she is praying a scriptural rosary in her bedroom.  Having been given a rosary by Precious and a scriptural rosary book upon request by Cricket (dd 9 yrs), she has gone to bed to pray before sleep.  I’m sure there are sweeter sounds to some, but the sweetest sound to my ears is the precious voice of my daughter haltingly lifted in prayer to the Lord. 

Surely, God has blessed me abundantly above all I could ask or imagine.

Shekinah Glory…

The first homeschool support group meeting of the year was held last night.  As I was driving over, with silence (oh blessed silence) in the car, I took the opportunity to pray the rosary.  Starting with the Joyful Mysteries, the first Mystery was the Annunciation. 

Recently, on the homeschool forums, we got into a pretty heated discussion of Mary (and all things Marian in the Roman Catholic Church).  As usual, several of us (the Catholic ladies on the forum) found ourselves defending practices we don’t engage in personally.  However, one thing considered Marian (I disagree with that by the way, I find it much more Christocentric than I do Marian. In reality, the rosary is a meditation on the life of Christ.) that I have found to be an incredible blessing is the Rosary (and all the prayers associated with it, even the Hail Mary, Hail Holy Queen, Memorare, etc).  During the course of that discussion one of the Catholic ladies said something about the presence of the Lord ‘covering’ Mary during the Annunciation.  Being well familiar with the sacred scriptures, this was not new to me although it did sort of roll lazily around in the pinball game of my mind a little longer than usual, as though there were something MORE there that I just wasn’t seeing.  In the end, it rolled quietly on down and off the board of my mind without any lights or bells going off.

Back to praying the rosary on the drive, here I am praying through the scriptures on the Annunciation and I get to the 8th Hail Mary bead and read the scripture for that bead…

And the angel said to her in reply, “The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.  Luke 1:35a

…and all the bells and lights and whistles on the ol’ pinball machine went off like lightening had run through it. It HIT me what that meant. When one thinks of the power of the Most high overshadowing something, what comes to mind? The column of cloud (and fire) that led the people in the wilderness in Exodus, the cloud/fire of the Presence that filled the Tabernacle in Exodus, the cloud on the mountain which encompassed the Presence and out of which the Voice called to Moses, also in Exodus, and in 1 Kings when the Temple is completed and the cloud, the Presence, the Shekinah of the Lord comes to dwell there in the Holy of Holies.  What did that ‘overshadowing’ of the ‘cloud’ show? The dwelling place of the Lord. Every. Time. It was a physical sign that the Lord was present and ’taking up residence’ as it were. That is what is happening in Luke 1:35!!!!  The impact of that expanded understanding broke over me like the first warm and sunny day after 8 months of winter and I could’ve basked in it for much longer than the short drive I had left. 

I never could’ve imagined that the Lord would teach me as much as He has through ’praying’ the rosary… Instead of the ’idol worship’ it was claimed to be, the rosary has proven to be an intimate time of communion and communication with the Lord and He delights in teaching me through it.  Once again I find myself treasuring a new pearl of great price found during its use.

The Rosary and Other Musings…

One of the biggest surprises, as I have delved further into all things Catholic, has been the Rosary.  As a protestant, I was very disturbed by all the Marian devotions… at best it seemed idolatry, at worst there were tales of equality with Jesus which just set every last hair afire.  A friend recommended a book on the Rosary that she uses with her children, Speak Lord, I am Listening: A Rosary Book, and so I placed an order.  I had a plastic freebie rosary from the church we used to attend, and thought I’d give it a try even though I was certain that the rosary wasn’t for me. 

The book arrived and I began to flip through it.  First, you make the sign of the cross and say the Apostles Creed… ok… no biggie there. I believe all that and lately I even can say the ‘Catholic church’ part now without mentally screeching “BY CATHOLIC I MEAN UNIVERSAL NOT ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH” which was quite the step forward if I do say so myself.  Then you say the Our Father.

 After that comes three Hail Mary’s… but not just Hail Mary’s for the sake of saying Hail Mary’s.  Each of the three beads represents a virtue… so the first bead is a Hail Mary for an increase in Faith.  The second bead is a Hail Mary for an increase of Hope, and the last bead’s Hail Mary is for an increase in Love. 

Then when you hold the next Our Father bead, you state the Mysteries you are going to pray, name the first mystery of that set, say the scripture for that, and then pray the Our Father. Then there is a scripture for EACH Hail Mary bead that you read and then meditate on as you SAY the Hail Mary for that bead. 

I soon realized that the Rosary wasn’t really ABOUT Mary at all!!!  It was a meditation and prayer on the life of Christ!  Something that I really hadn’t done hardly at ALL as a protestant and certainly not something that was encouraged as a part of daily devotions! Sure, it was Marian to the extent that you quote what the scriptures say about Mary repeatedly and ask that she pray for you and for all sinners now and at the hour of our death, but how is that any different than asking a living friend in the faith to pray for you? Are not those who have gone before living?  Of course they are… the only Marian thing about the Rosary is that it seems to have been given by/inspired by Mary as her way of encouraging us to meditate and dwell upon the life of her son, our mutual Savior.

I have learned much in the brief time that I’ve been praying the rosary and it has become a joyful time of prayer when my girls and I pray it aloud together.  Primarily I pray a scriptural rosary, but a friend has written up scriptural rosaries for praying for your children, and one of consecration based on the story of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compeigne as told in To Quell the Terror, which I also pray.  I am so excited by how greatly my prayer life and meditation is enriched by this.

Some of the biggest protestant ‘issues’ with the Catholic church that I was aware of before becoming Catholic have been proven completely unfounded not only by what I’ve learned in RCIA classes and observed on my own, but also by simply praying the rosary and what I’ve learned while doing that.

 It was said that Catholics worship Mary.  They don’t worship Mary, the Roman Catholic church doesn’t advocate worship of Mary and the Rosary isn’t worship of Mary.

It was said that Catholics don’t read the Bible. I have never been a slouch at Bible study etc, but I am becoming even more fully immersed in scripture than ever through my ‘conversion’ process in the Catholic Church.  Every time I turn around I’m being encouraged to read scripture, given a Bible with the apocrypha because I didn’t have one, given a lectionary with the reading schedules for Sunday Mass for YEARS to come and encouraged to read them ahead of time in preparation each week, even my penance for First Reconciliation was meditation on scripture and prayer.  Instead of the ‘quiet time’ touted by protestants, this is a life SATURATED with scripture.  It is unbelievable!

It was said that Catholics left Christ on the cross, not only because of the crucifix but also in their attitude about life and faith.  On the contrary I have found that the resurrection is just as celebrated and embraced as it ever was in the protestant circles, if not more, but Catholicism has traditions in place that will not let them forget the price paid for the salvation we enjoy and all too often that was not dwelt on nearly enough in the churches I attended. 

I have found the Catholic church more understanding and forgiving when someone fails or falls short of the mark, less likely to shoot their wounded, more willing to come along side to encourage and help you back onto the straight and narrow. The people I have come to know in our Church are much less concerned about appearances and much MORE concerned with the welfare of the person and state of their heart. For example, the evening we had the Rite of Welcome one of the alter servers had leaned the crucifix against the door.  A regularly attending parishioner and his wife opened the door only to have the crucifix slide over and hit one of them hard in the head.  The husband reacted with a rather loud, “OH SH*T!” and everyone in the sanctuary turned to look but the reaction was what made me laugh and smile for the rest of the evening.  The general reaction was not shock and offense that the House of the Lord was somehow desecrated by the use of profanity (as would’ve happened in any protestant church I’ve ever attended), instead it was concern for the people involved… were they ok? Once it was ascertained that no real injury had been sustained, everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief and turned back to the front to wait for the Mass to begin.  What joy that brought me!

I digress but I get so excited about what I’m experiencing and learning.  The riches and blessings God has poured out upon us are overwhelming and the desire to share is intense.  However this post has run long and it is late and I need to go if we’re going to get to have evening prayers as a family.