His Eminence Aloysius Cardinal Ambrozic
Archbishop Emeritus of Toronto
Biography :: Letters, Homilies, Statements :: Articles

Lord, Teach Us to Pray
February 1993

What is prayer? What do we do when we pray?

Prayer is personal communion, personal conversation with God. It is the awareness of His knowing and loving us; it is enjoying His presence and dwelling in it. Prayer is listening to God, responding to Him, thanking Him, begging Him. It may be completely wordless, as in the case of two persons saying nothing but being intensely conscious of each other.

Prayer is not good feeling or calm euphoria; it is not meditative mood; it is not even mere thinking about God. Though these states of mind and heart may accompany and help our praying, they are not prayer. It is above all personal contact with God, the most personal Being there is. He is not a luminous cloud floating in the sky but Someone who knows each one of us, loves us more than we love ourselves, and calls us to Himself.

Christian life without prayer can hardly be called life, just as a marriage where husband and wife no longer communicate, each one being wrapped in himself and herself, is a lifeless marriage. It is in prayer that the specific nature of a given religion shows itself most clearly. Important, indispensable in fact, as good works may be, they do not manifest the essence of religion as fully as does prayer. Religion being the relationship with the Ultimate, it is prayer which contains and voices it. The disciples came to Jesus asking him to teach them to pray, as John the Baptist taught his own disciples to pray. They wished Jesus to give them the inner core of the faith he was proclaiming.

Then Jesus taught them the Our Father, telling them how God wants to relate to us and how He wants us to relate to Him. He is Father to us and wants us to know and treat Him as Father. But we must remember that He remains God, infinitely superior to us: His concerns, not ours, are thus to be uppermost in our hearts and minds. Our first prayerful desires concern Him: we ask, first, that His Name be "hallowed", i.e., that He may be known and worshipped as God, and that His Kingdom may come, i.e., that everyone and everything come to know and do His loving will. Then only are we taught to pray for ourselves. The two great commandments of Jesus follow the same pattern as the Our Father: the first and greatest commandment is that we love God, the second that we love our neighbour.

Friendship, lasting love, good relations with others do not just happen. If they are to last we must work at them. The same is true of prayer. It can happen on its own at moments of difficulty or happiness when a spontaneous "Help me, God" or "God, I thank you" wells up. In general, however, we need discipline and set times. There are empty moments and periods, more or less predictable, in most of our days; these we can "fill" with prayer. God will then gradually become a constant presence to us.

We ought to be humble enough to admit that we need help in praying. At times we imagine that the best way to pray is to pray in our own words. Such praying could become very individualistic and self-centred, however. Prayers given to us, such as the Our Father, Hail Mary, psalms, prayers from the Liturgy teach us how to pray. Hail Mary teaches us how to relate to Our Lady, "Glory to God in the highest" and "Glory to the Father and to the Son..." teach us how to spell out Hallowed be Thy name. Psalms express the most fundamental attitudes of human beings before God, prayers to or about Saints tell us what holiness is about.

Structure and concreteness are important; we have no right to imagine we are "above" such needs. The Liturgy of the Hours offers such a structure, so does the Rosary: it helps us to pray to Jesus in the company of his Mother through the most important events of his life, death and resurrection.