The Heart of Catholic Prayer

The Heart of Catholic Prayer.  By Mark P. Shea, Our Sunday Visitor, 2012.

 

Prominent Catholic writer Mark P. Shea, best known for his blog, “Catholic and Enjoying It!” (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/), is well-known for making theology and religious history clear and accessible to a contemporary audience.  Shea’s trilogy on the Virgin Mary, Mary, Mother of the Son, was reviewed here in March, April, and May of 2011.  Shea’s most recent book is The Heart of Catholic Prayer, a short but wonderfully informative volume explaining the history and significance of Catholicism’s two most prominent prayers, the Our Father and the Hail Mary.  In this book, Shea explains the true nature of prayer and argues against common misconceptions about what happens when we pray.

 

“Because we don’t know what we are doing when we pray, God sends us help.  The principal help he gives is the Spirit, who, if you will, prays through us and in union with us.  That doesn’t mean we are empty vessels and that every prayer that pops into our head is an oracular utterance of the very mind of God.  It means that God the Holy Spirit guides and helps us to pray more and more like Chris in the power of his Sonship.  That, in turn, directs us back to the fact that Christ is our teacher in the school of prayer, especially in and through his inspired word in Scripture and in the liturgy of the Church, since the Mass is the highest form of prayer.  With his disciples, we say, “Lord, teach us to pray!”– and he does.” (11)

 

In The Heart of Catholic Prayer, each line of the Our Father and the Hail Mary receives its own chapter.  Each chapter is only about ten pages, making the book easy reading, especially for people who are trying to study religion with limited free time.  It may be daunting to read a lengthy volume, but it is easier for many people to set aside several minutes a day to read just one short but information-filled chapter.  In just a few paragraphs, Shea is able to explain away a common misconception about Catholic prayer practices such as the rosary:

 

“When we turn to Christ’s teaching on prayer and the fact of the liturgy, we discover something odd: one of the many curiosities of the Christian tradition is that when Jesus undertakes to teach about prayer, he begins by waving us all away from meaningless repetitive prayer: “And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Matthew 6:7).  But in the next breath, he gives us a prayer that he obviously expects us to repeat, a prayer we have indeed repeated for almost two thousand years– the Our Father.  Is this a contradiction?

 

No.  Jesus is warning against meaningless repetition, not meaningful repetition.  In this warning, he has in view a sort of magical notion of prayer, in which we can somehow gain power over the unseen by mere repetition or by saying just the right incantation so that God has to knuckle under to our will, like a genie.  It reduces God to something like a capricious sprite who spends his days scrutinizing trivialities (“Was that ten Hail Marys you said this decade or only nine?  Denied!”), rather than a God who is Father and filled with love for his children.  There’s something at once childlike, superstitious, and savage in such a picture of prayer, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to fall into.” (12).

 

What makes The Heart of Catholic Prayer such a valuable resource is the way that Shea is able to make a complex and often daunting topic comprehensible and digestible for the average reader.  Shea is equally comfortable referencing diverse topics such as religious historiography, the contemporary blogosphere, writings of early Christians, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all in the same chapter.  It creates an intriguing amalgam that makes the book readable without ever descending into “pop” theology.  He is always clear without being simplistic, such as when he outlines the relevance and importance of each prayer.

 

“[T]he Hail Mary is profoundly the prayer of a disciple.  Like the Rosary of which it forms such a vital part, it is a prayer ordered toward looking at Jesus through the magnifying lens of Mary’s life.  But it is also a prayer that teaches us to see Mary as the greatest recipient of grace, as well as our model and Mother in how to live out that life of grace in our day-to-day walk with Christ.  It is a prayer that strings together the basic biblical teachings about Mary and quotes freely from (1) Luke’s infancy narrative; (2) the Council of Ephesus, which declared Mary to be the “Mother of God”; and (3) the cry of the Catholic heart that she stand by our cross of death as she stood by Christ’s.” 

 

Mary is the disciple who sticks with us in our wretchedness when all others have forsaken us, just as she stuck with Jesus.  What the Hail Mary is not is a prayer that Mary take the place of God.  The whole point about her is not that she is a goddess who stoops down to us and “empties herself” as Jesus did, but rather that she, being a mere mortal, is exalted by the grace of God to sit in the heavenlies with the Son of God.” (15).

 

This book is more than just explaining the meanings of two prayers.  It also explains why prayer is essential to the life and soul of Catholics who take their faith seriously.  Shea concludes his book with the following passages:

 

“In all this, the Our Father and the Hail Mary keep us on an even keel and remind us that at the heart of the faith is the heart or, more precisely, the two hearts of God and his Bride.  Jesus, of course, has a heart that beats as one with the Father’s heart.  Indeed, he is the heart of the Father.  Jesus’s humanity is at one with the Father, God in him and he in the Father; but though the focal point of Christian faith is the heart of God revealed in Christ Jesus, it is not the totality, just as the totality of a wheel cannot be the hub alone.  

 

What I mean is this: Christianity is about salvation.  Jesus’ very name means “The Lord is Salvation.” But though the heart of God is Jesus, Jesus is not the one being saved.  We are.  So our hearts must enter into the picture as well.  Our hearts must be in Jesus’ heart, and he in ours.  That is why the Hail Mary is constantly paired with the Our Father in the Church’s devotional life, especially in the Rosary.

 

It is not enough that Jesus triumphed over death and ascended to heaven.  If nobody goes with hi,, the whole exercise was a pointless waste of time.  In the Hail Mary, we are perpetually reminded that the human heart Jesus took with him to heaven bore within it the heart of the human being who loved him more than anybody else– and that she followed her heart all the way to heaven.  We are given the glad news that we can do the same, as many already have, if we but place our heart in theirs and join in their love for each other.  In Jesus, who is the Heart of the Father, and Mary, who gave Jesus both his human heart and her own heart as well, we find our salvation.” (151).

 

On the magnificent British cooking show Two Fat Ladies, the co-hostess Clarissa Dickson Wright once observed that, “There are fifty-six words in the Lord’s Prayer and 2,600 in the EEC (European Economic Community) regulations of the export of duck eggs.”  This quip illustrates how concisely the central prayer of Christianity is phrased, whereas contemporary bureaucracies utilize verbosity to promote triviality.  Mark Shea brilliantly– and enjoyably– explains how every word in the Our Father and the Hail Mary is important, and how the whole of each prayer is so much more than the sum of its parts.

 

 

–Chris Chan