Pints With Aquinas - What Exactly Am I Supposed to Do In Prayer? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

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Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute and this is Pines of the Quinas. In this episode I'd like to talk about a little difficulty in mental prayer. Specifically, I'd like to address how we know that prayer is working, quote unquote, because sometimes you can gauge progress in the spiritual life. You're like, I delight more in God, I delight less in sin, there seems to be something going

on in my interior life that I can't account for otherwise. But often enough we don't really know what's going on in our interior life. And in those moments I think it's helpful to have not so much like a program, but a way of proceeding so that way we can have some modicum of assurance that our prayer is doing what it ought to do that is to say cultivating communion with the Most High God. So let's think about it a little bit together here we go. Alright so there are plenty of traditions which propose methods of prayer you've probably heard of the Ignatian tradition in which you imagine

yourself within the setting and proceed through steps, you know, kind of manipulating as it were, or not in the bad sense manipulating, but like manipulating or changing that scene so as to enter more deeply into its logic. Or you may have heard of the Silesian method of prayer, which is outlined for us in the introduction to the devout life, or you may have come across more Carmelite types of prayer. Here I'm just going to propose what St. Thomas Aquinas teaches in the Summa Theologiae, and you might think to yourself, wow, boring. Well it happens to be quite nice, right?

Simple, straightforward, and eminently practicable, because what it is, is it's effectively a liturgical method of approach. Not in the sense that you should spend all of your prayer time at mass, and if you think Practicable because what it is is it's effectively a liturgical method of approach Not in the sense that you should spend all of your prayer time at Mass And if you think like, you know, this 32-minute mass was not sufficient So I'm gonna go to another mess not not in that sense but like we're seeking to kind of grow from a liturgical basis such that a Liturgical spirituality kind of envelopes or encompasses the whole of our life And the idea here is that we want to intend and we want to attend.

All right. So we're going to focus on intention and attention. We think about intention and attention when it comes to the sake of liturgy quite naturally, right? Because you, you have often have like an intention for mass. So the priest has an intention. Well, he has kind of like three intentions. And then you have an intention.

And so it's something that you're deliberate about, right? It's something that you think through because what is an intention? It's like an end or goal. All right, so you set it for yourself, you resolve upon it, you say this is what it's for. And then attention, when we think about that in the setting of the sacred liturgy, it's like, all right, I want to pay attention to like, what's going on to what's being said, and then to what's kind of taking place in

My interior life. So same time. It says let's just use this as a basis for the life prayer more broadly Okay, so we've got intention was what is it that you intend? basically you intend to be with God all right you you intend to spend this time in prayer and We can grow our intention by becoming more honest, genuine, sincere, forthright, straightforward about that intention. So if you say like, I want to pray, but if you have your phone, not on Do Not Stir, but your phone just out in front of you, and you slept two minutes the previous night, and you are currently smoking a cigarette, you're probably not too serious about that intention. You're probably not being honest,

genuine, sincere, forthright, straightforward, okay. Because we need to kind of grow into our intention. We need to become worthy of our intention. We need to become true to our intention. And so you see how that intention kind of has a way of growing out or extending the limits or extending the bounds that it encompasses. So it's like, all right, if I'm serious about this being for God, a time of prayer, then I need to safeguard it. All right?

So that might mean like, all right, I got to set the phone aside. I got to get a little bit of sleep. Like maybe put this cigarette out and spend some time not smoking cigarettes. Like can you pray while smoking cigarettes? Yes. Should you smoke cigarettes while praying? No. You see the difference?

Okay. So we wanna have a dedicated space, a dedicated time, a somewhat regular schedule. We wanna have it such that we do the things which God has blessed. We do the things which God has made known as mediating the life which we wanna cultivate. Okay?

So at the same time as we'll say that merit is attached to intention. So it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Basically the idea here is that if you say, I'm going to pray a holy hour every day, and you work towards praying a holy hour every day, then that's meritorious. That's good. But let's say that your holy hour is interrupted because somebody knocks on your door because the next door neighbor's house is on fire. Is your prayer less meritorious? Well, just kind of take it to face value. No, because you intended to pray a holy hour and circumstances notwithstanding, you would have prayed a holy hour. But here we are, okay? So does that mean that again we tell lies to ourselves and say like, I intend to pray a holy hour, but it just so happens that every day at about the

Same time I'm interrupted. Yeah, we can't do that, right? So like if you're a busy mom, for instance You're probably not gonna have as much time to pray you might not have as much time to pray But if you find a time that does work for you, like before all your kids get up It might be hard. It might be taxing. It might be even discouraging at the outset But but you'll probably find that it's worth it. Will you probably have to go to bed earlier? Yes. Will you probably have to watch Netflix less? Yes.

But I think that's what we mean by intention. I want to do this thing, and so I have to be honest about it. I need to be authentic, sincere, I need to be straightforward. Okay, so then on the basis of that intention, we can drill down and lend our attention. And St. Thomas, again, like I said, we can take our cue from the sacred liturgy. He says, pay attention first to the words, and then to the senses of those words,

and then to the God who lies concealed within those senses. Okay, so words. Basically, you're a human being. Alright, you have a mind with which to know and a heart with which to love. You are made to the image and likeness of God. You're made to live an intelligent life. Alright, does that mean you have to be smart? No, but it means that you have to think and love and seek to improve in your thinking and your loving. Alright, so that means that we're trying to pray and study the faith and we're introducing

some penitential practices into our life in order to free up those higher powers lest they be enslaved by lower powers and their excesses or defects. So pay attention to the words. The world, its realities, are addressed to you for your understanding. So we believe right faith, but we seek understanding that is to say we want to mature our faith We want to think through our faith So that way our love has more like handles or more knobs or more whatever else so that it can lay hold of and wrap Its arms around and embrace ultimately. All right So we exercise our minds so that we can better exercise our hearts And so we pay attention to the words as what is addressed to us as human beings for our understanding.

Alright, so you can think about this in terms of like reading sacred scripture, or you can think about this in terms of attending the sacred liturgy, or you can just simply think about this in terms of cognizing God, you know, like perceiving, thinking through, mulling over, meditating upon, contemplating God. So we do it in a way that's often mediated by words or mediated by images but nevertheless it's a human thing. So we pay attention. So if you are inclined to sit down to prayer and you typically drift off or succumb to distraction or just totally vacate the time, there might be something

worthwhile to that. But if you are very given to distraction or to Dispersion or to vacation then you might use some words that is to say read the sacred scripture or prepare a meditation And think about God in more deliberate and intentional fashion so that way your mind has some Nourishment that it can digest and then baton on said spoil Okay, so then through the words to the senses of the words ultimately we want to think about the sacred realities. Like a lot of us come up against this when we pray the rosary because we're like, all right, do I pray the Hail Mary's or do I think about the mysteries or do I meditate on God? Yes, okay. So it's good to have something for you know

like our mouths or our minds to kind of chew on, masticate, but ultimately that should set our minds free so as to commune with the sense of the words, to commune with the mysteries themselves. So when we think about Our Lady saying, yes, the angel Gabriel, and we think about the prayers that are kind of taken together making up there the most holy rosary. What we're thinking about is a kind of meditative way of offering ourselves to God so that we can lay hold of sounds to again manipulative or controlling, but so that we can gain access to the mysteries which he uses for our salvation.

Like our Lord Jesus Christ took human flesh and lived our life so as to accompany us through the whole of ours And so there's something there right there's salvation there And what we're ultimately meant to do is gain access to those mysteries so that we can abide with them and so that they can Have their saving effect in us, but we go through the words to the mysteries All right, so that means there's going to be some kind of cogitation. There's going to be some I've used the word mastication before, but it just sounds so crass.

Nevertheless, we're going to be chewing on it. We're going to be working through it. So we have to have something that we use or something that we lay hold of in order to attain to the sense of the words so that we can abide with those things, so that we can live with those things. And then say St. Thomas, ultimately it's about God, right? You want to be with God. So you can think about like the steps of Alexio Divina.

You read a passage and you meditate upon a passage based on what leaps off the page to you or what seems strange to you or what kinda causes questions to arise in your heart, whatever it is. But then you formulate that as prayer, all right? So then you pose it back to God and you say like, show me your face or render this clear

or help me to be more faithful to whatever it is that you revealed in this time of meditation or give me a desire for it or whatever else. But you pose it to God as a conversational thing. You kind of take what you've been working through in your mind through words and senses and you kind of force it through your heart such that you'd have some substance on which to work in your ongoing relationship with the Most High God. You don't want to just like show up and be like, what are we doing here? You want to be like, I've been working

through this, like what do you think? Or like, I've been sorting this out, does it seem right to you? You know, you want to have something to kind of discuss, action steps, whatever. So then when we come before God in a spirit of prayer, we're kind of working these things that we've been thinking through or meditating upon through our hearts so that we can offer them to the Lord, not merely for his judgment like good, bad, but for communion. Like we want to have talking points or we want to have, yeah, a kind of common approach, as it were. We want to have a common project that we as friends, right, spouses, can apply ourselves to. So that gives you a kind of framework. Intention, all right? I intend to pray to be with God. That's the basis of merit. It's what makes the

thing worthy and it's what occasions God's blessing. But if I'm going to intend a thing, I need to be somewhat serious about the intention. I'm going to grow into the intention, but I need to be on the lookout for ways in which I'm going to intend a thing, I need to be somewhat serious about the intention. I'm going to grow into the intention, but I need to be on the lookout for ways in which I'm lying to myself or deceiving myself. So I need to be honest about the use of my phone, about my bedtime, what I'm addicted to or what I'm attached to or what I'm otherwise enslaved to so that I can ask God to heal that and grow me beyond it and actually mature this intention so that it really lays hold of the intended end.

And then attention. That's to say I want to give myself to those things which God has set at my disposal within the setting of my intention, set setting. And that's words, senses of words, and the God who lies concealed within. All right? So I take those words which have been mediated to me by the church in our tradition, the sacred scripture, the sacred liturgy, the readings or writings of the saints, you know, like Christian preaching and teaching, but effectively something intelligent and intelligible, something that's for me as a

human being, something that's made to kind of like elevate my mind and heart to the most high God, which is that, you know, like what we mean by prayer, and then to get at the sense of those words. So I'm not just doing a grammar or vocabulary exercise, right? I'm trying to do comprehension, not like to master it or to like ring all of the sense out of it, but to chew on it, to meditate upon it, to effectively digest it in the way in which God intends, so that ultimately I can find God there, because God has revealed himself in this way, mediated himself in the way in which God intends so that ultimately I can find God there because God has revealed Himself in this way, mediated Himself in this way so that He can meet us in this way. And that will mean formulating these readings and meditations as prayings so that we'll

have something to discuss, so that we'll have something to work on together. And in that you get God because God in His dealings with us always gives Himself. He might give His gifts, but when you get the gifts, ultimately you get the gifter. Think of any gift exchange. Like, what do you want? You want the person. What do you want to offer? You want to offer yourself, right?

So too in the life of prayer. So I think that helps us to kind of sort through some distractions or help us to kind of quiet some anxieties as it concerns a method or approach Or a way of living our life. So I hope it's fruitful for you If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel This year is pints with Aquinas if you push the bell you get sweet email updates when other things come out on YouTube And then if you haven't checked out God's plenty yet do so we talk a lot about prayer So quite quite a few of our episodes are on the

subject of prayer, so I think that you'll find some spiritual sustenance there as well. And then, oh, I'm writing a book right now actually about the Eucharist, and there's going to be a section in chapter 4 about intention and attention. So you can look for that in a billion years whenever it comes out. In the meantime, I wrote another book called Prudence, Choose Confidently, Live Boldly. You might enjoy that, you might not. It's really hard to say. Alright guys, know of my prayers for you, please pray for me. I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.