Prayer: Session #5

Prayer: Praying the Psalms

Personal Prayer is the meeting place between the Eternal One and me; the Blessed Sacrament is the visible sign of my covenant with him. That is why I believe in personal prayer , and why every day I wait to meet him in the Eucharist. To pray means to wait for the God who comes. Every prayer-filled day sees a meeting with the God who comes; every night which we faithfully put at his disposal is full of his presence. And his coming and his presence are not only the result of our waiting or a prize for our efforts: they are his decision, based on his love freely poured out. His coming is bound to his promise, not to our works or virtue. We have not earned the meeting with God because we have served him faithfully in our brethren or because we have heaped up such a pile of virtue as to shine before Heaven. God is thrust onward by his love, not attracted by our beauty. He comes even in moments when we have done everything wrong, when we have done nothing, when we have sinned.

From The God Who Comes by Carlo Carretto

Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. --Revelation 3:20
I doubt that I know of a passage in the whole Bible which throws greater light upon prayer than this one does. It is, it seems to me, the key which opens the door into the holy and blessed realm of prayer. To pray is to let Jesus come into our hearts. This teaches us, in the first place, that it is not our prayer which moves the Lord Jesus. It is Jesus who moves us to pray. He knocks. Thereby he makes known his desire to come in to us. Our prayers are always a result of Jesus' knocking at our hearts' doors. From Prayer by O. Hallesby

Scripture Study
Psalm 139
Psalm 148
Luke 11:2-4

The Psalms are Christianity's most universal prayers. They speak to everyone's need and experience. Make the Psalm your personal prayer --pray the Psalm. Some people are disturbed by the "bloodthirstiness" of many of the Psalms and have rejected them to their own spiritual deprivation. In fact, the Psalms can (and should) be used to remind us of the "enemies," that seek our destruction, that we should hate, and then to guide us into prayer that God may destroy them before they destroy us. In earlier times and places, the enemies were physical and concrete. Those who first heard the Psalms knew there were real lions, tigers, and serpents "Out there," and the tents they call home were slim protection from such enemies. But what about us? Are our lives free of "arrows" and "terrors" and "enemies" which threaten to destroy us? No, the "enemies" are just as many and as deadly, but they are now "in here," inside us, and they are more subtle and harder to escape --enemies such as the lust for power, laziness, spiritual boredom, worry, fear, unrelenting anger, extramarital relationships, pride, coveting. If we see the "bloodthirsty" Psalms as the expression of frustration and helplessness every Christian experiences as he or she struggles against the enemies unique to himself/herself and a desperate plea for God's justice and deliverance, then the Psalms can become some of our most power-full prayers. Spiritual growth requires that we do battle, not that we pretend the enemy is not there. In these struggles, the word of God is one of our greatest resources of prayers, hope, and direction --resources which may be wasted is we do not define our own wilderness and the enemies which lurk there.

From A Guide to Prayer by Rueben P. Job & Norman Shawchuck

Why has the Church always considered the Psalms her most perfect book of prayer? In the Psalms, we drink divine praise at its pure and stainless source, in all its primitive sincerity and perfection. If we are to pray well, we too must discover the Lord to whom we speak, and if we use the Psalms in our prayer we will stand a better chance o0f sharing in the discovery which lies hidden in their words for all generations. For God has willed to make Himself known to us in the mystery of the Psalms. To put it very plainly: the Church loves the Psalms because in them she sings of her experience of God, of her union with the Incarnate Word, of her contemplation of God in the Mystery of Christ. If we really come to know an d love the Psalms, we will enter into the Church's own experience of divine things. We will begin to know God as we ought. And that is why the Church believes the Psalms are the best possible way of praising God. St. Augustine adds that God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it. Praising God in the words of the Psalms, we can come to know Him better. Knowing Him better we love Him better, loving Him better we find our happiness in Him.

From Praying the Psalms by Thomas Merton

The phrase "learning to pray" sounds strange to us. If the heart does not overflow and begin to pray by itself, we say, it will never "learn" to pray. But it is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself. For then we confuse wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, rejoicing -- all of which the heart can do by itself -- with prayer. And we confuse earth and heaven, man and God. Prayer does not mean simple to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with hi, whether the heart is full or empty. No man can do that by himself. For that he needs Jesus Christ. He (Jesus) wants to pray with us and to have us pray with him, so that we may be confident and glad that God hears us. When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ, then we pray correctly. Only in Jesus Christ are we able to pray and with him we also know that we shall be heard. And so we must learn to pray. The child learns to speak because his father speaks to him. He learns the speech of his father. So we learn to speak to God because God has spoken to us and speaks to us. By means of the speech of the Father in heaven his children learn to speak with him. Repeating God's own words after him, we begin to pray to him . We ought to speak to God and he wants to hear us, not in the false and confused speech of our heart, but in the clear and pure speech which God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ. God's speech in Jesus Christ meets us in the Holy Scriptures. If we wish to pray with confidence and gladness, then the words of Holy Scripture will have to be the solid basis of our prayer. For here we know that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, teaches us to pray. The words which come from God become, then, the steps on which we find our way to God. Now there is in the Holy Scriptures a book which is distinguished from all other books of the Bible by the fact that it contains only prayers. The book is the Psalms.

From Psalms The Prayer Book of the Bible by Dietrich Bonhoeffer