I have been thinking about prayer this weekend. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but my life took a marked change for the better a couple years ago when I adopted a regular routine for prayer.
I remember when I was little, my dad would lead us through prayers at bedtime. We would all kneel by our beds and pray together. I think we started with the Our Father and Hail Mary, and maybe the Glory Be – presumably because he wanted to teach us those prayers. We would end by listing the people for whom we wanted to pray.
Unfortunately, that habit got away from us at some point. In fact, I forgot about those days for quite a while. Worse yet, I didn’t establish that habit with my own kids. Sure, we took them to mass on Sundays and raised them Catholic, but I’m so disappointed that I didn’t instill that habit of daily prayer at bedtime like we did when I was a little girl.
So finally, as a 50-something woman, I rediscovered the daily routine. This time it is in the morning. I start each day is to curled up in my chaise. I read the daily readings from the lectionary and the meditation from Blessed is She, and I write in my prayer journal.
It is somewhat difficult to explain how this has changed me. In general, I have become a much more positive person. I am more easily able to roll with the punches through the rest of the day, and I feel like I am constantly learning something new.
For example, the topic for this blog post came to me while reading Friday’s Gospel. St. Luke describes one of the times that Jesus healed a leper, but it is the last line of the reading that jumped out at me. After describing how so many people came to Jesus for healing and to hear his teaching, St. Luke tells us that Jesus, “would withdraw to deserted places to pray.” (Luke 5:16)
Certainly, as the son of God, the Christ, one person in the Holy Trinity, it would be easy to assume that Jesus wouldn’t need to worry about finding time to pray. Yet he not only prayed regularly, he found a quiet place to pray.
Jesus showed us how important it is to spend quiet time with God. Imagine: if that was important to Jesus, just think how much more we need it. We live such busy lives these days. There is so much noise in our world. The best gift we could ever give ourselves is to carve out a small block of time to spend in a quiet space talking with God.