OUR DAILY DUTY

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 5, 4 February 1925, Page 31

OUR DAILY DUTY

Every Christian, and especially every Catholic, is convinced that the poet uttered a genuine truth when he wrote: “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.” Any one who is at all familiar with Holy Writ is moreover convinced that the duty of praying is of prime importance in the life of a Christian. St. Paul’s counsel, “Pray without ceasing,” is tantamount to saying that prayer should be not only the daily food of our souls, but their continual respiration. This advice of the great Apostle of the Gentiles is, of

course, only the echo of his Divide Master’s teaching, since among all the duties imposed upon us as Christians, there is not one more frequently insisted upon than prayer, not one that Christ has more solidly established by His ordinances, or more highly conse-, crated by His example. I All prayer deserving of the name implies elevation of the soul to God. In genuine; prayer wo separate ourselves from our labors, our occupations, and the sensible objects by which we arc surrounded, to fix ourselves upon Him. We extricate our minds from the hurly-burly of worldly affairs and material interests in order that we may enter into ourselves, may commune with the Almighty, may occupy ourselves with Him and with our eternal interests. St. Teresa tells us; “If, when one is praying, one regards and considers the fact that one is conversing with God more attentively than one considers the words one is uttering, one is making both vocal and mental prayer, which may be of much advantage. If, however, one does not consider with whom one is speaking nor what one is saying, it may he thought certain that, no matter how much one may move one’s lips, one prays very little.” In other words, prayer is a real intercourse, a heart-to-heart conversation with God; and the great danger to be avoided in the recital of vocal prayers is the saying of them in a purely mechanical, routine fashion with none of that elevation of the sold which alone can vivify the sterile formulas, and raise the utterance of certain set expressions to the plane of actual praying. 1; Even the most fervent Catholics may, of course, he disturbed while at prayer by numerous distractions — the more worldly one’s life, the more multiplied will he such distractions, —but there" is no excuse for discontinuing on that account the regular recitation of our daily prayers. Distractions do not vitiate or nullify our praying. If, as soon as we notice them, we endeavor to put them out of our minds, and bring our attention back to the consideration of God and of the words which we are addressing to Him, these distractions are of no practical account. One point that can not he too strongly insisted upon is that we should never, under any circumstances, abandon the practice of praying, even if, to all appearance, our prayers have not been granted. St. Teresa well says on this matter: “Souls that have no habit of prayer are like a lame and paralytic body, which, though it has hands and feet, cannot use them. To abandon prayer, therefore, seems to me the same thing as to lose the straight road; for, as prayer is the gate through which all the graces of God come to ns, when this is closed, I do not know how we can receive, any of these graces.”- Another saying of the same gjeat Saint is a consolatory one likely to encourage and sustain many a faltering traveller on the road to salvation. “The soul.” she tells us, “that perseveres in the exercise of waver, however many sins, temptations, and falls the devil opposes to it. may hold it for certain that, after all, the Lord will sooner or later rescue it from danger, and guide it to the harbor of salvation.”---Arc Maria.