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Amy Welborn

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Teach us to pray: Glory be…

Photo Credit: Matthias Kabel (Wikimedia Commons)
Photo Credit: Matthias Kabel (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s not a very long prayer – but chances are, if you’ve ever been at a Catholic event like sacramental preparation, youth ministry gathering, or any other parish meeting – you’ve prayed the Glory be:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.

You may also have come across another translation of this prayer – most commonly found in the Liturgy of the Hours:

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.  Amen.

Amy Welborn says that this prayer is the summary “of everything our prayer has been (or should have been) about,“ a prayer which “points us in the right direction and attaches us to the divine and the eternal.“  This is high praise for one of the shortest prayers in our tradition – a prayer we don’t say at Mass – but do use at the conclusion of each decade of the Rosary and many times during the Liturgy of the Hours.  It also tends to show up at the conclusion of many gatherings – particularly if someone forgot to prepare something or if we might be running short on time.

Although the Glory be is brief, it’s a rich prayer both because of what it is – and what it reminds us. [Read more…] about Teach us to pray: Glory be…

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Hail Mary

Photo Credit: Old Wallpaper from lifeteen.com
Photo Credit: Wallpaper from lifeteen.com

When I began to seriously investigate my faith, one of the things I was really struck by was Pope St. John Paul II’s devotion to Mary.  It seemed like every homily he gave and every letter or book he wrote ended with some sort of recourse to the Mother of God.  When I began to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, I realized how fitting this was – the Church’s official prayer ends each day with a prayer dedicated to Mary.

Arguably the most recognizable Catholic prayer is the Hail Mary:

Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with you.  Blessed are you amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death, amen.

The prayer itself is quite simple and has a history going back several centuries.  The form by which we pray it today found its final form in the sixteenth century – concluding a journey that took centuries. [Read more…] about Hail Mary

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Teach us to Pray: The Lord’s Prayer

Rembrandt's "Return of the Prodigal Son" (Public Domain)
Rembrandt’s “Return of the Prodigal Son” (Public Domain)

When I worked with a traveling retreat team, we used to present a skit that began with one of our team members walking onto the stage, kneeling down, making the sign of the cross, and beginning to pray the Lord’s prayer.  The only thing is she wouldn’t get very far, as after saying the words Our Father, who art in Heaven, a voice offstage would reply “Yes?”  (This was particularly effective if we could use a microphone and a boomy sound system…)  The rest of the skit would be a dialogue between the person praying and God about what all the parts of the Our Father actually mean.  The most telling line of the whole skit came early on, after she had again said Our Father who art in Heaven and God had answered Here I am… what’s on your mind?  She would reply:

I didn’t mean anything by it. I was, you know, just saying my prayers for the day. I always say the Lord’s Prayer. It makes me feel good, kind of like getting a duty done.

The Our Father is one of those prayers – usually one of the first prayers any of us ever learned to pray.  It’s one many people Catholic, Christian, and otherwise can recite from memory – and we are often just like the girl in the skit: praying it without giving it a second thought.  But there’s much more here.  Of all the wrote prayers you might use to begin your conversation with God, the most important is the Our Father.  It isn’t important just because it comes from Scripture (most of the Hail Mary is also from the Gospels), nor because it explains something that we believe (the Sign of the Cross does this as well), it is important because it is the answer Jesus gave when His apostles asked Him how they should pray (Matthew 9:6-13, Luke 11:2-4).   [Read more…] about Teach us to Pray: The Lord’s Prayer

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Lord, teach us to pray….

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Photo Credit: Essam Saad on Flickr (Creative Commons License)

“Lord, teach us to pray…” -John 11:1

Since I don’t remember going through it myself, it has been a fascinating exercise observing my children as they learn how to speak.  Each of them begins with no clue whatsoever where to start – so they do the only thing they know how to do: they cry.  Eventually those cries become sounds that represent something – usually, their best imitation of the sound they think represents their needs.  The sounds become words, and once the words become sentences: look out, because many of us don’t stop communicating once we get started!

As I write this, my fourth child is making a great effort to copy the sounds he hears the rest of us saying in a desperate effort to make his wishes known to us.  Sometimes these sounds make no sense at all – so he repeats them, louder and louder in hopes that we will figure it out… and when he gets through to us, the joy he feels is palpable.  Eventually, he’ll find his words – and his voice – and he’ll be able to talk and listen as well as anyone else (and I look forward to that day – I still have no idea what he means 95% of the time.)

Learning to pray is not that much unlike learning to talk.  At first, it may feel like trying to communicate with God is beyond our capacity.  So we cry out to Him – usually in a moment of need.  But if crying for what we want is all that we do, we may find that the ‘relationship’ part of being close to God is lacking – so we seek for words.  Our first words in prayer are usually those copied from others – the Lord’s prayer, Hail Mary, or even the lyrics of a particularly moving hymn or song.  These borrowed words are always with us – and are often helpful for getting the conversation started.  However, to grow in prayer means that we need to regularly move beyond the words of others and find our own voice – conversing with God using our own words (and listening to His reply.)

For many of us, however, the idea of conversing with God is a long ways off, and you might be unsure on where to start.  I’m going to spend some time breaking open the words of several traditional Catholic prayers – to help get you started and to help you find more meaning in some of our rote prayers.  One of the resources I’m going to use for this series is a book by one of my favorite Catholic authors, Amy Welborn, “The Words we Pray.”  If you want to read it yourself, you’ll find that Amy goes much deeper into these prayers than I can on a blog – and several prayers I likely won’t get to.

So as you seek to deepen your own life of prayer – to find your own words (and learn to listen to His) – I pray that this series will be a blessing to you.  (And don’t forget to pray for me!)

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