Pints With Aquinas - Weird Parts of the Life of Prayer | Fr. Gregory Pine O.P.

Episode Date: December 9, 2023

What is happening when I pray? Am I changing God's mind? Why should I pray if God has already made up his mind? Father Pine answers these questions. 🟣 Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd We get a small kick back from affiliate links

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work as an assistant director for the Thomistic Institute. And this is Pines with Aquinas. And in this episode, I would like to talk about prayer. You're like, oh my gosh, another video about prayer. But here's the thing.

I want to talk about prayer as weird or why prayer seems so weird. Because not just in the sense of weird like boring or like fatiguing or like distracting I think a lot of us have that experience we're not talking about that maybe we could talk about that regardless keep going and I'm talking about the weirdness of like what's actually going on when you pray like are you asking God for a thing and then he changes his mind and gives it to you? Like he wasn't inclined to give it to you before but now he's inclined to give it to

you because you prayed. Is that what's going on? Spoiler alert, no. Or when you pray to saints, what's exactly going on there? Like I thought about asking God but I suspect he might say no so I'm going to ask this saint because she's a total softy or I've got like a cool family connection And so my request will not be denied like what's going on with that? What what's going on with that?

So let's think a little bit about prayer in its weirdness so that we can be better Recollected and then better abandoned in our practice of prayer and hopefully it will yield great fruit. Here we go. Oh Here we go. Oh yeah, here we go. Prayer. So, what is prayer? Prayer, as Saint John Damascene says, is the raising of one's mind and heart to God. Or as Saint Teresa of Avila says, it is the simple gaze of the soul upon the God by whom she knows herself to be loved.

So what do we take away from that? Prayer is an intellectual act or a mental act. Basically it's something that transpires in your mind and reaches up to God. It's actually an act of a virtue and the virtue is called religion. And you're like, what? A virtue called religion? I thought religion was like a thing or like a list of beliefs. So when we talk about religion here,

we're talking about a virtue, which is part of the virtue of justice, which aims to give God what he is due. What does God do? God is due worship and subjection. That is to say, a recognition of who he is and what he's about, right? And then we should refer that recognition to him in love,

or in devotion and prayer. So prayer is an act of a virtue, and so it's a virtuous practice, one that makes us in turn good and to act well. So it's good to pray, because it's good to recognize that God is and to render to God thanks on account of the fact that He is our Creator and our end. So then what exactly are we doing when we pray? Yeah, I think a lot of us think about prayers like moving stuff around, like, all right, God is asking for help with his spring cleaning,

so let me pitch a hand in and pray. No, it's not that so much, because God doesn't need anything, and he doesn't need us, and he doesn't need our prayers. So, if he prompts us to pray, or if he asks us to pray, it is for his praise and glory, but it's also for our good, for our betterment, because God's not changing up there, all right? He just is and does, and without any alteration. I was looking for a synonym of change, so I didn't say change twice within the same, you know, six seconds, and then I just said the word change like 20 times within the last six seconds. So keep going.

Okay, so when we pray, we are doing any number of things. There's a helpful acronym, ACTS, which outlines the four main modes of prayer. So the first is adoration, wherein you praise God simply. You recognize God as above all things, above all persons, and you refer that to him, that recognition in subjection but also in like a spirit of exaltation. It is good that you are and it's wonderful in fact. And then you've got contrition, right, which is an acknowledgement of our sins or our various vices and things like that before God. So it's a kind of cultivation of sadness and hatred of those past sins before God and asking

Him for the grace to heal and to grow, right, to distance ourselves from those things so that we can convert more perfectly and satisfy for the various faults that we've committed. Okay, and then you've got Thanksgiving, T, and that's thanking satisfy for the various faults that we've committed. Okay, and then you've got Thanksgiving, T, and that's thanking God for the things that He's given you because you recognize Him as their ultimate source, even if they were given to you by your cousin or by a random person at a 7-Eleven. That's not important, but you get it. Okay, so the fourth and final is supplication.

So the S stands for supplication or prayer of petition. When you ask for things. And St. Thomas will say that God always answers those prayers which are offered devoutly and perseveringly provided that they are asked for the things necessary for salvation and for yourself. And you're like, for yourself? That sounds selfish. Well, what he's saying there is when you pray for yourself, you're on the lookout for

any obstacles or hindrances to the reception of that grace. And so, yeah, you're not going to get in your own way because you're praying for the gift. Whereas when you pray for somebody else, they might be posing obstacles or hindrances, so they might be getting in the way and make it hard for that grace to take root. So when you pray for yourself, you're ensuring that the way is paved. And when you pray for the things necessary for salvation, obviously God delights to give those things. Okay, so you think here of like conversion or contrition or whatever else conduces to salvation. And devoutly and perseveringly.

That is to say, with a certain promptness, right, and over the course of the whole of one's life, God, right, makes all things work to the good for those who love him and are called according to his promise, and our life of prayer reflects that. So then, when we pray, we're ultimately being transformed by this relationship with God before whom we come in a disposition of adoration, A, contrition, C, thanksgiving, T. supplication, S. acts. Okay? Now when you pray, the actual unfolding of that might take different shapes again. And I made a video maybe a couple of months ago about the practice of Christian meditation, so I'm not going to delay long over this issue. But basically, maybe you're engaging with the text, or maybe you're engaging with your

experience, or maybe you're just coming before the Lord in the blessed sacrament saying the holy name of Jesus. But there's a kind of process whereby you start prayer, recall yourself to God's holy presence, thank him for the gifts that he's given, ask for the gifts that you need, and then you begin to meditate, which is to say work through certain considerations, pertinent to God and to his gift of himself. And then, you know, like you'd start to kind of work through those meditations in such a way as to move them through your heart, or kind of push them through your affect, so as to motivate a deeper conversion, so as to impress them more perfectly on your humanity. And then that might in turn give rise to a kind of contemplation whereby God reveals himself in a way that makes of you someone more kind of actively receptive or even passively subject to that revelation.

So there's less in the way of moving and grooving and more in the way of basking and loving. So that'd be like the basic shape of Lectio Divina for instance where we talk about reading, meditating, praying, and then contemplating. So this is a basic kind of description of prayer, but I'm wondering specifically like when we pray and do all these things that we just described, what's going on in the Godhead? What's going on with the saints? What's going on with us?

Well, I think the big point to have in mind is that God asks for our prayers, like I said, not because He needs them, or not because they visit any change upon His divine nature, but ultimately for us. Because God wants us to be not just passive recipients of His grace, but also active causes of its distribution in the world, of its transmission to the soul. So God wants to involve us in the giving of divine life. God wants to implicate us in the dispensation of salvation. And so prayer is one of the ways in which we do that.

So God has foreordained that certain graces be given through prayer, all right? So he can give us any graces. He can give us whatever grace he wants and the way that he wants. He wills that certain graces are applied or kind of like commemorated and applied in our lives through prayer. So like this grace is going to be assigned to you by your persevering and devout prayer

on account of the fact that it's a thing necessary for salvation and it's good to give it to you. Or this particular thing is going to be commemorated and applied in your life by virtue of the prayer of somebody, you know, interceding for you in a monastery in California or whatever else. So God holds together all these different contributions, these different causes in the created space so that he can orchestrate a more glorious work.

Not that there's anything lacking to his agency, to his realization of these transformations in the life of grace, but because he wants to spread that glory, he wants to spread that wonder through the whole created order. So our prayers don't change God's mind. We pray that what God has foreordained in fact come about through the prayers that he has appointed to the task. Think about that for a second. Our prayers,

they realize what God has foreordained, and they are themselves the very means through which God has ordained that the effect come about. So when we pray to God for this and such a thing, God wills that we receive thus and such a thing. He wills that it happen by virtue of our prayers. And his delays aren't for the purpose of teasing us, right, or for reducing us to the point of utter desperation, but rather to create a desire in us, right, to create a capacity in us to receive that gift when he gives it in turn with greater facility, right, and to lay hold of it with greater perseverance. So then when we pray to the saints, it's a similar story. We're asking them

to intercede on our behalf. So on the one hand, we're venerating them because God is glorious and his saints and God has done a wonderful thing in their lives. Okay? But on the other hand, I don't know how long I've been out of focus, I hope a thousand years. But on the other hand, right, we are also asking of them that they apply the merits that they obtained in their lives to our lives, and that they do so not only by God's permission, but by God's positive will, because God wants to be at work in our lives through the prayers of His saints. So when we pray St. Terez, I'd really love it if you could intercede on my behalf in this particular way and assign to me this grace and thus in such a manner.

So God wills that it take place through St. Therese's prayers and he appoints her as a kind of, lowercase m, mediator to that task, as an expression of his power and of his mediation. Because God likes that we go to him together, because it communicates the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit at every level of the dispensation of salvation, so that we can share in a communion of persons as we mount by progressive stages to the communion of persons who is God Himself. So we're not sneaking behind God's back. When we pray to the saints, we're entering deeply into God's plan. I recently preached at the Dominican Rosary Pilgrimage, which is now annual by the way, so September 28th, 2024,

mark your calendars. it's going to be awesome. I was talking about how at one point I was hiking in the mountains and a variety of misadventures all befell at the same time so I had forgotten my snowshoes and there was a lot of snow and it had been relatively pleasant temperature wise up until I got to the top and crossed over into another valley and it got super cold and Then I had had cell phone reception for navigating via my hiking app and then I lost reception and the confluence of those factors meant that I was trudging through snow and my

Like hydration bladder hose had frozen so I could get water but I had to like pull it out of my backpack and I was Taking less water and less frequently and then I just couldn't see where I was on the map. I still had the image of the map, but I didn't know exactly how I was supposed to get off this cliffside in effect. That's to be a bit too dramatic, but to get off this mountain, which was steep at certain points, which made it forbidding to descend by other ordinary means. And so I was just trudging along, praying that God would get me through it. And this was over the course of an hour, an hour and a half.

At a certain point, I started hearing avalanches in the region, terror on every side. And at a certain point I had the thought that I'd been lost previously whilst hiking once and it had been like 12, 14 years prior. And when I had been lost, I had the opportunity to call my family after having called search and rescue, but I chose not to because I thought they'll just worry and they can't do anything But in the time since my mother had passed away and so I thought to myself Well, my mom won't worry and she can do something So I prayed to my mom and within seconds of having said that prayer

I saw a like a marker of the trail that I hadn't seen previously and then from the vantage of that marker I saw footprints that came from the valley floor and trekked up the mountain and actually ended at the very place where I was standing. So it was almost as if somebody had come from the valley and mounted all the way up to that point so as to recover me, so as to, you know, lead me back down. So I followed those footsteps off the mountain and successfully navigated, you know, whatever other misadventures might have fallen. And I hit the valley floor just as the lights were coming on in town." And so, I told that story in that context as a way by which to illumine Our Lady's Marian

intercession. It's not like Jesus wasn't answering my prayer for an hour and a half and then my mom answered it within seconds. It's like Jesus was answering my prayer and not answering it, and then He was answering my prayer through that relationship with my mother. So the Lord uses the saints as a way by which to communicate His grace with tenderness and affection in a way that's like familial and social and ecclesial, and it's wonderful, right?

So there's nothing lacking to Christ's mediatorship. You know, Christ is the sole and unique mediator of all salvation, of all persons to be saved, before, during, and after the present time. But he loves his saints, and he is glorious in his saints, and so he uses the prayers of his saints to involve them in that dispensation of salvation and to communicate it to us in a way that's somehow delightful. Wonderful, in fact. So that is the basic shape of the thing.

This is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel and push the bell when you do so because then you'll get cool email updates when other things come out. Also, I contribute to a podcast which is called God's Playing with four other Dominican friars and we do a lot of stuff about prayer and about the saints.

So you might check in and dig it. And then lastly, what else is up? I wrote a book it's called Prudence. Choose confidently, live boldly, and it may be of service to you in your life and in your choices because that's the point to help you in your life and in your choices. So that's all I got. Know of my prayers for you please pray for me and I will look forward to chatting with you next time on Ponds with Aquinas. Oh and if you make it to the end of the episode there's here like a little Easter egg. I'm recording this video and then it's going to be posted in

several days, but in the time between recording and posting, I'm going to defend my dissertation. So hopefully by the time you listen to this, it will have gone well. Regardless, I don't know exactly how prayer works with time travel and stuff, so if you could say a prayer for me, I would certainly profit from it and appreciate it. Okay, that's it. Cheers.