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Is There A Right Way To Pray?

Modern Man

Three Catholic men on prayer: what it actually is, why most men quit, and the one question that decides whether any of it is working. Sam Halligan, Brad Piersonand Noah Gilchrist sit down for Modern Man. No guest. Personal prayer, mental prayer, family prayer, and an hour of disagreement about the Mass.Prayer is the exchange of hearts. That is Brad's definition, borrowed from the patristic sources, and it is the sentence the whole episode turns on: here is my heart,Lord, in exchange for yours. The anxious one. The wandering one. The one that feels over-busy. Give me yours in return. Everything else in these sixty-fourminutes is an argument about the means by which that exchange happens, and whether the means have quietly replaced the end.Because the honest version is that most men are told to have a prayer life and never told what one is. Thinking about God is not prayer. Receiving doctrine is notprayer. Stacking devotions is not prayer. One of them spent his whole childhood praying rote prayers and measuring his worth against the count, and then met aGod who had already declared him good before he started. One of them says out loud that he struggles with the Mass, that his mind trails, that he gets more fromtwenty silent minutes with a Bible at five in the morning than from a liturgy, and that he does not go to daily Mass. One of them answers that grace is not afeeling: that a distracted man in a pew still receives what is given there, that efficacy is not emotion, and that a warm body present at the Eucharist is still a bodythat grace reaches.Then the disagreement that runs underneath the whole hour. If a man goes to Mass every day and is still a bad husband, still sarcastic, still unkind in the way hespeaks to the people in his house, what exactly is the prayer doing? One of them argues that we judge our prayer by whether it is transforming us, and that themost discouraging thing in Catholic life is a man who tells you he prays daily and does not look like Jesus. The other two push back: comparison is its own trap,grace works in dry seasons, and the fruit is often invisible to the man bearing it. They land in the same place from three directions. Prayer that produces nocharity is prayer that has gone somewhere else. Name one act of charity at the end of it, and do that thing today.Also in this conversation: the missionary who told a nineteen-year-old to skip daily Mass and pray on his own instead, and why that was bad advice; the marriageanalogy that makes the whole thing concrete, two people who get everything done and never once sit down together; a man who came back from his conversionretreat, was told to babysit his siblings, and punched a hole in the wall on the way up the stairs; what his family actually noticed a year later, which was that hedid the dishes every night; five minutes turned into right now instead of a full hour promised tomorrow; whether praise and worship with a guitar and drums isoptional, and what Romans 12:1 means by calling your body a living sacrifice and your spiritual worship; the man who is guided by himself and is guided by afool; and a practice of thanking God for the flat tire, the expensive gas, and the milk a child spilled on the couch last night. The last third turns communal. The Church obliges the laity to exactly one form of prayer, Mass on Sunday, and every other thing — the Rosary, the chaplet, theHours, a worship set with a guitar and drums — is offered rather than required, because she knows she is dealing with men who were each made differently.