Mental Prayer

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

There was a mother once who used to go to Mass each day, and she decided to bring her five-year-old daughter with her. The daughter was there all throughout the Mass, and she had recently made her First Communion.

When the mother finished Mass, she stayed back to do a few moments of thanksgiving and the little girl stayed with her. When the mother was finished, she came out of the church, but the little girl stayed on a bit longer.

When she eventually came out, the mother was a bit curious, and she asked her what she had been talking to Jesus about. And the little girl said, ‘I told Jesus that today I'm going swimming, and if He wants, He can come and stay inside me, and be a bit like a submarine inside me as I swim around in the water.’

The mother was very impressed by the simple childlike prayer that her daughter knew how to say to Jesus, telling Him about the simple, ordinary things that she was going to do that day.

This meditation is about our mental prayer.

Our mental prayer is meant to be precisely that: the conversation with Jesus about the ordinary things that we're going to do each day, or that we have done.

There are two types of prayer. There is vocal prayer, and there is mental prayer.

We tend to know an awful lot about vocal prayer. The vocal comes from vox, voces in Latin, voice. The prayers of the voice—the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Mass, the Rosary—these are all vocal prayers.

But there's another type of prayer which is mental prayer, whereby we pray with our mind. Mens, mentis in Latin means mind. That tends to be much more personal, much more private. It's very intimate.

Vocal prayer is said with many people, and while it has its place, it can also be a bit anonymous. But there is nothing that will bring your spiritual life forward faster than a few moments of mental prayer each day.

“When you pray,” said Our Lord, “go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matt. 6:6).

Our Lord invites us to withdraw into the room of our heart frequently. Shut the door of that room and be alone with Our God in an intimate, personal, heart-to-heart relationship.

The heart is very important in our faith. There are many times in Scripture where the heart is emphasized: “Come back to me with all your heart” (cf. Hos. 14:1). “Rend your heart and not your garments” (Joel 2:13). “I will take out your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26).

Our Lord tells us we should withdraw into the room of our hearts and have that intimate, personal relationship with Him. To grow in intimacy with Jesus we need periods of mental prayer.

Mother Teresa, speaking to a retreat for priests in Rome many years ago, said to them that we have to have a tender love for Jesus. Very beautiful words falling from her lips. Really, everything that's written in Scripture about prayer is directed towards that.

“In the morning, long before daybreak, Jesus got up, left the house, and went off to a lonely place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35).

Our Lord was a busy man. He had many things to do. He had to go around all the towns and villages. He had to instruct many people. Maybe He had to perform miracles.

But before all that, way before all that, He spends time in prayer. He, just so long before daybreak, gets up early like a model for the busy person in the modern world that we live in.

Our Lord gives great primacy to His periods of prayer. He seeks the best place to talk to His Father God. It's as though He's very aware that everything that He's going to do this day may depend on that conversation with His Father God.

Likewise, we have to try and have a schedule: a resolution to spend time in prayer, but then also a definite schedule. ‘I'm going to do my mental prayer at this particular time.’

Sometimes I ask people, ‘Do you pray during your day?’ And sometimes the answer you get is, ‘Yes, Father, when I'm lying down on my bed at night and I have one eye open and one eye closed—that's when I talk to Jesus.’

And you sort of feel like saying, ‘It won't be too long before the other eyelid closes also.’

If the most important person in the country was coming to see you, you wouldn't tell them to come at 10.30 at night when I'm lying down on my bed, and I have one eye open and one eye closed.

You give them the best time of the day. Usually, the best time of the day when we are more mentally awake is the early morning period.

St. John Damascene defined prayer as “the raising up of the mind and of the heart to God” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 2590). Both our mind and our heart have to be involved.

If it's all mind, then it's just thinking or planning. If it's all heart, then it's pure sentimentalism. There has to be a balance.

“And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, and kneeling down, he began to pray. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘if you are willing, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, let your will, not mine, be done’” (Luke 22:41-42).

Before everything important, Our Lord spends time in prayer. Even on that last night before the beginning of the Passion, He separates Himself. “He withdrew from them, about a stone's throw.” It’s a curious way of measuring distance.

He indulges Himself then, this period of prayer. He knelt down and said this powerful prayer: “If you are willing, take this cup away from me.”

Our Lord was no masochist. He recoiled away from human suffering in horror and disgust. He was “like us in all things but sin” (Heb. 4:15).

But then comes the powerful part: “Nevertheless, let your will, not mine, be done” as though teaching us that it's in prayer that we learn how to accept the will of God, whatever that will may be.

But for all their beauty, these words are not the most important words in the passage. The most important word is the first word, Father.

There was no contradiction between the fact that God was about to visit Him with the greatest amount of human suffering that any human person ever experienced, and the fact that He's a loving Father.

Sometimes God may ask us for great sacrifices. But yet we know those come from the loving hand of Our Heavenly Father. And if He asks us for great things, it's because He wants to give us great things.

“If you, evil as you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him?” (Matt. 7:11).

“Now it happened in those days he went out onto the mountain to pray, and he spent the whole night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12).

Our Lord really emphasizes the point, the importance, of being a soul of prayer. And so, we can ask Our Lord in this period of prayer that He might teach us how to pray.

One of the good requests that the apostles made of Our Lord was that. They got a lot of things wrong, but they got that right. “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1).

They didn't say, Teach us how to work miracles. Teach us how to influence the masses. Teach us how to do all sorts of things. They said, Teach us how to pray.

Somehow that grace to understand the importance of prayer petered through into their mind and heart and soul.

We could ask Our Lord for the grace never to lose our concern to be a more prayerful soul. To give importance to this reality. To spend time, to have our schedule. To plan our periods of prayer.

Certain topics should pass through our prayer in a regular way: our family, our humility, our charity, our purity and chastity, our work, our apostolate.

There may be certain topics that crop up from time to time that we need to bring to talk to the Master about them, to understand the realities of these mysteries a little better.

We find our peace in prayer. God has great spiritual consolations to give us in prayer. Those spiritual consolations can be worth far more than all the material consolations in the world. “As the deer yearns for running water, so my soul thirsts for you, my God” (Ps. 42:1).

Pope St. John Paul II liked to say that we all suffer from a hole in the heart. There is a chasm, he said, in the human heart, and that can only be filled by God.

God has taken a piece of our heart. He's kept it for Himself in heaven. That's why there's that hole in our heart. We only get that piece of our heart back when we go to heaven.

“Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in you” (St. Augustine, Confessions). But when we unite ourselves to Our Lord in prayer, it's as though He gives us back that piece of our heart for a little while.

We can find joy, peace, consolation, meaning, purpose. Pope St. John Paul II liked to say that the search for meaning in life is the search for God. In Christ, he said, we find the meaning and the purpose of our life.

That's not just for Catholics, but for every person on the planet. That's as much as to say, “if we don't find the meaning and the purpose of our life in Christ, we don't find it anywhere.’

So it makes an awful lot of sense that we might spend time in prayer every day, talking to the Master, listening to what He has to say to us.

The Holy Spirit breathes prayer into the soul of man, inspires us, gives us ideas, calms us down—“let not your heart be troubled” (John 14:1)—lets us see things, apostolic horizons, great projects, things that God wants us to achieve in our apostolic life.

Sometimes Our Lord wants us just to sit and listen to Him.

“In the course of the journey he came to a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. She had a sister called Mary, who sat down at the Lord's feet and listened to him speaking” (Luke 10:38-42).

Initially, you get the impression that Martha is the good one. She's hospitable. She's proactive. She's, maybe, at the door of her house, seeing who's coming in and out of the village. She welcomes Our Lord.

But then she leaves Him. She goes off to busy herself with all the other chores that she has to do in the house. She's busy, busy, busy, whereas Mary sits at the Lord's feet and listens to His word.

Then Martha comes to complain to Our Lord. “Is it no concern of yours that my sister has left me to serve alone?” In one sentence, she mentions herself three to four times.

Our Lord has to speak to her in a sort of a tired voice. “Martha, Martha.”

It's about the only time in Scripture that Our Lord speaks like that. He never says Peter, Peter; John, John; James, James. But He does say, Martha, Martha, as though to help us to notice what He's going to say next:

“You're anxious and troubled about many things, and yet only one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the best part, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Our Lord doesn't say that Mary has more or less chosen well, or she's sort of done okay. No, He leaves us in no doubt. The best—superlative. “It will not be taken away from her.”

He makes it very clear that the one to imitate is Mary. The trouble is that we're all Marthas and we need that conversion to become Marys. We're all anxious and troubled about many things, rushing around the place, doing things.

We ask Our Lord for that conversion. The engine for that conversion is mental prayer—to sit down and listen to the Master.

The value of prayer doesn't depend on what we feel, but on the love with which we try to do it. There might be times when Our Lord sends us great consolation in prayer. We feel in the seventh heaven, on the clouds.

But there might be times when we get no consolation at all in our prayer. We might feel dry, arid. One spiritual writer says, If ever you feel that way in your prayer, persevere in that prayer because that may be the best prayer that you ever did—because that prayer is all done for God.

If our prayer is full of human consolations, it might be that we're going there looking for those consolations. But when there's no consolation, then we know it's all done for God.

Persevere in that prayer. If we spend time in prayer, it helps us to see things with a supernatural outlook, which means to see things as God sees them. And that can bring a great peace.

We seek God in the center of our soul in grace. It helps us to see the providence of God in the ordinary events of each day.

That leads us to thank Him, to give Him praise; maybe, to say sorry, to atonement, and we see how He's offended with all the sin in the world, or how we ourselves have offended Him or neglected Him in various ways.

A good way to start the prayer is with a prayer similar to the way we have started this period of prayer. These meditations are precisely meant to be periods of prayer.

They're not just to talk when you listen. The idea is that you use the words of the priest to direct them to Our Lord. You do your own prayer with these words. The priest doesn't do your prayer for you.

It's a personal relationship. A heart-to-heart relationship. And if you pray that preparatory prayer well, it's like a plane taking off, and in fact, revving up before the plane starts to go down the runway.

It helps us to get our minds and hearts working in prayer. In those moments we wholeheartedly turn to God. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me.

A lady stood up at a get-together with Blessed Álvaro del Portillo in Dublin many years ago. She said, “Father, I have eight children and I have to look after them. I have to do the cooking and the ironing and the washing and the cleaning and go to the market and the supermarket...”

She went through a whole long list of things that she had to do every day. She said, “How can I find time in my busy day to fulfill some norms of a plan of life? Of a spiritual life? A bit of prayer, a bit of spiritual reading, my rosary, my Mass.”

Blessed Alvaro said to her, “The list of things you have to do is very impressive. It's true, you're a very busy lady. But,” he said, “you've left something out of your prayer. You've left God out of your prayer. You’ve left Him out of your list. Put Him into your list and you put Him first, and you'll find you'll have time for all the other things.”

That's really the secret. Put our spiritual life first. Get that period of mental prayer done early in the day. Or that fifteen minutes of spiritual reading. Or our Mass. Or other spiritual activities that we try to do.

You'll find that God will multiply your time for all the other things.

Try and have a remote preparation for your prayer. It may be that certain things may strike you as you go through the day, an idea, or something somebody says.

It would be good to think: ‘I need to bring that to my prayer; I need to talk to God about that thing.’ That may be the Holy Spirit speaking to you.

St. Teresa of Ávila used to say that when she spent time in prayer, the less God talked to her in prayer; but the more He talked to her in all the other moments of the day.

If you spend time in mental prayer, you will experience something similar. You'll realize the Holy Spirit is speaking to you through this person or that person or this event that happens.

St. Paul says to the Romans, “And as well as this, the Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness, for when we do not know how to pray properly, then the Spirit personally makes our petitions for us in groans that cannot be put into words; and he who can see into all our hearts knows what the Spirit means because the prayers that the Spirit makes for God's holy people are always in accordance with the mind of God” (Luke 8:26-28).

A good thing to read can be the fourth part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is all about prayer. It's a wonderful compendium of all the most wonderful things that have been said and written about prayer in the last two thousand years.

It's a mysterious but real dialogue with God. It's a loving, trusting conversation. We have to try and turn the whole of our life into prayer.

If you spend time every day in mental prayer, you will find it much easier to live presence of God during the day. You have little human reminders that will be like a call to lift up your heart and soul and mind to God in thanksgiving, in atonement, in praise.

One of the headings in that section on prayer in the Catechism talks about the battle for prayer. It's interesting that the Church uses such a bellicose word, battle for prayer.

It's a battle because we have to overcome the things that hold us back: our laziness and our lack of order.

The devil is very interested that we don't spend time in prayer. He wants to keep us away from that at all costs, because he knows the power of prayer and how it's prayer that brings everything forward.

There's another very useful little phrase that Our Lord has given to us in Scripture, which is, “Unless you…become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).

We have to become like little children in our prayer. If ever you are close to one of your children or your grandchildren, or some small child that is praying, pay a lot of attention. We can learn a lot from small children.

A little kid once was saying his night prayers with his mum. He was four or five years of age and he said, ‘God bless mummy and daddy, my brother, my sister, and everybody else in the family.’

And then, shouting, he said, ‘And for Christmas, I want a bicycle.’

The mother said to him, ‘You don't have to shout. God is not deaf.’

He said, ‘No, but Grandma is.’

Little children are very clever. They know how to get what they want.

Our prayer has to be childlike, simple, humble, very aware of who we are and who He is. We know that God can do everything. He can work all sorts of miracles.

For all the big things that we may ask Him, sometimes He says yes. Sometimes He says no. Often He says, Wait, this is not the moment; this is not the right thing.

If it might seem sometimes that God says no, it's not that He's not listening. It's just that maybe He wants to give us something better and He wants us to wait.

There was a little girl who asked Santa Claus for a thousand dolls for Christmas. Her father was an atheist. She got one doll.

The father said to her, ‘Well, your God didn't listen to your prayer, did he?’

And the little girl said, ‘Yes, He did. He said no’—she was very clear—'God always listens to my prayer. And sometimes, just like you, who are my father too, He says no. But that doesn't mean He doesn't exist.’ The clarity of thought of little children.

We are called to pray with a lot of faith. I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. We remind ourselves in faith that God is there.

Our prayer is confident, simple. We can ask Our Lord for the grace to take more advantage of the time that we spend in prayer.

Our Lord says, “Abide in me and I in you” (John 15:4).

Prayer is the language of hope. We go back to God again and again. Every time He's bringing our spiritual life forward, we're growing in intimacy with Him.

In The Forge, we're told, “The spirit of prayer which fills the entire life of Jesus Christ among men teaches us that all our actions—great or small—ought to be preceded by prayer, accompanied by prayer, and followed by prayer” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Forge, Point 441).

We see the primacy that that activity has to have in our day.

St. Teresa of Ávila said, “Prayer is nothing else than a friendly conversation, very often being alone with the one we know loves us” (St. Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life).

The lover seeks the Beloved (Song 3:2). We can pray anywhere. We can pray in the middle of a busy street, at a traffic light, in a field.

But we also know that that conversation with Our Lord Jesus Christ is often best carried out in His presence in front of the tabernacle. Try to spend at least one period of prayer in front of the tabernacle every day.

Our Lady is the great teacher of prayer. We can end with that childlike prayer that says,

Lovely Lady dressed in blue—
Teach me how to pray!
God was just your little boy,
Tell me what to say!

Did you lift Him up, sometimes,
Gently on your knee?
Did you sing to Him the way
Mother does to me?

Did you hold His hand at night?
Did you ever try
Telling stories of the world?
O! And did He cry?

Do you really think He cares
If I tell Him things—
Little things that happen? And
Do the Angels' wings
Make a noise?

And can He hear me if I speak low?
Does He understand me now?
Tell me—for you know.

Lovely Lady, dressed in blue—
Teach me how to pray!
God was just your little boy,
And you know the way.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JOSH