A School of Prayer: The Saints Show Us How to Pray

A School of Prayer: The Saints Show Us How to Pray. By Pope Benedict XVI, Ignatius Press, 2013.

 

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is famous for being a teacher as well as a pontiff.  Benedict XVI has received a lot of publicity lately for being the first pope in centuries to abdicate, but in all of the media coverage over his stepping down, precious little attention was paid to the massive amounts of theological scholarship Benedict XVI produced over his lifetime.

 

In A School of Prayer: The Saints Show Us How to Pray, his last book to be published during his pontificate, Benedict XVI describes the history of prayer, the psychological and social roots of prayer, and how Catholics can use prayer to make themselves better people and bring themselves closer to God.  This book is an anthology of recent essays and address by Benedict XVI, all of which revolves around the role of prayer in a Catholic’s life.

 

In the Introductory Note based upon a letter from May 4, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI writes: 

 

“Today I would like to begin a new series of Catecheses.  After the series on the Fathers of the Church, on the great theologians of the Middle Ages and on great women, I would now like to choose a topic that is dear to all our hearts: it is the theme of prayer, and especially Christian prayer, the prayer, that is, which Jesus taught and which the Church continues to teach us.  It is in fact in Jesus that man becomes able to approach God in the depth and intimacy of the relationship of fatherhood and sonship.  Together with the first disciples, let us now turn with humble trust to the Teacher and ask him: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Lk 11:1)

 

In the upcoming Catechesis, in comparing Sacred Scripture, the great tradition of the Fathers of the Church, of the Teachers of spirituality and of the Liturgy, let us learn to live our relationship with the Lord, even more intensely as it were at a “school of prayer.”

 

We know well, in fact, that prayer should not be taken for granted.  It is necessary to learn how to pray, as it were acquiring this art ever anew; even those who are very advanced in spiritual life always feel the need to learn from Jesus, to learn how to pray authentically.  We receive the first lesson from the Lord by his example.  The Gospels describe jesus to us in intimate and constant conversation with the Father: it is a profound communion of the One who came into the world not to do his will but that of the Father who sent him for the salvation of man.” (7).

 

Benedict XVI has rarely received the credit he deserves for his skills as a communicator and writer.  All of the essays in this volume are clear, concise, and convincing.  Benedict XVI writes with a quiet erudition and unwavering faith, and his voice is that of a man who seeks to bring people true happiness by strengthening their religious lives.  There is a warmth and subtle amiability in his words as he addresses his audience:

 

“Dear friends, in these examples of prayer of different epochs and civilizations emerge the human being’s awareness of his creatural condition and of his dependence on Another superior to him and the source of every good.  The human being of all times prays because he cannot fail to wonder about the meaning of his life, which remains obscure and discomforting if it is not put in relations to the mystery of God and of his plan for the world.

 

Human life is a fabric woven of good and of evil, of undeserved suffering and of joy and beauty that spontaneously and irresistibly impel us to ask God for that light and that inner strength which support us on earth and reveal a hope beyond the boundaries of death.” (12).

 

One of the central themes of this book is to emphasize the important role the prayer ought to play in someone’s life.  Many of the “new atheists” treat prayer as a habit passed on through superstition and ignorance.  Benedict XVI utterly rejects this view, stressing that prayer is an essential need for every human being’s mental and spiritual health.  Prayer, and therefore religion, is essential to making life worth living.  Benedict XVI expounds at length upon this point, writing that:

 

“We live in an age in which the signs of secularism are glaringly obvious.  God seems to have disappeared from the horizon of some people or to have become a reality that meets with indifference.  Yet at the same time we see many signs of a reawakening of the religious sense, a rediscovery of the importance of God to the human being’s life, a need for spirituality, for going beyond a purely horizontal and materialistic vision of human life.  

 

A look at recent history reveals the failure of the predictions of those who, in the age of the Enlightenment, foretold the disappearance of religions and who exalted absolute reason, detached from faith, a reason that was to dispel the shadows of religious dogmatism and was to dissolve the “world of the sacred,” restoring to the human being freedom, dignity and autonomy from God.  The experience of the past century, with the tragedy of the two World Wars, disrupted the progress that autonomous reason, man without God, seemed to have been able to guarantee.

 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “In the act of creation, God calls every being from nothingness into existence… Even after losing through his sin his likeness to God, man remains an image of his Creator, and retains the desire for the one who calls him into existence, all religions bear witness to man’s essential search for God” (n. 2566).  We could say– as I explained in my last Catecheses– that there has been no great civilization, from the most distant epoch to our day, which has not been religious.

 

Man is religious by nature; he is homo religious just as he is homo sapiens and homo faber: “The desire for God” the Catechism says further, “is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God” (n. 27).  The image of the Creator is impressed on his being and he feels the need to find light to give a response to the questions that concern the deep sense of reality; a response that he cannot find in himself, in progress, in empirical science.

 

The homo religious does not only appear in the sphere of antiquity, he passes through the whole of human history.  In this regard, the rich terrain of human experience has seen the religious sense develop in various forms, in the attempt to respond to the desire for fullness and happiness.  The “digital” man, like the cave man, seeks in the religious experience ways to overcome his finiteness and to guarantee his precarious adventure on earth.  Moreover, life without a transcendent horizon would not have its full meaning and happiness, for which we all seek, is spontaneously projected towards the future in a tomorrow that has yet to come.” (13-14).

 

Despite his retirement, Pope Benedict XVI is certain to be a major figure in many people’s religious education for a very long time.  Most of the pundits and newscasters who reported on the final weeks of Benedict XVI’s papacy ignored his considerable written output.  Actually reading the works of Benedict XVI takes people beyond the shallow and ill-informed media coverage of the end of his papacy, hopefully strengthening the faith of his readers and increasing their respect for the man himself.

 

 

–Chris Chan