The Jeff Cavins Show (Your Catholic Bible Study Podcast) - Write Your Own Holy Card

Episode Date: December 12, 2017

As Catholics, we're used to praying prayers that we find on holy cards. It's a beautiful tradition, but sometimes it can feel like the prayer we are praying is hard to fully make our own. In this episode, Jeff reminds us that we don't have to be saints to write our own carefully crafted prayers—prayers that help us enter more fully into the different seasons of our life. After listening, you might just want to write your own holy card.

You're listening to the Jeff Kaven show, Episode 43, Write Your Own Holy Card. Welcome to the show, and thanks for joining me again this week, as we are really looking at all things that are related to becoming a modern, day disciple of Jesus and how to put our faith into practice. And today we're going to be talking about writing your own holy card. Now that might sound a little bit funny because you're thinking to yourself, well, I'm not a saint. I'm not in heaven. But you are a saint. You know, not necessarily capital S, but a small S. You are counted among the saints. And I'm going to give you today a kind of a neat idea on what you can do not only for yourself and your own spiritual

growth, but something you might be able to do for Christmas this year or for any anniversary or any birthday, anything coming up in the future. I realize that as you're listening to this, it might not be right before Christmas. You might be listening in June, July, or August, but nevertheless, you can use the principles that I'm going to talk about today about writing your own holy card. And I'll tell you how that idea came to me, which actually happened during mass last week. Hey, I got the... some good email. I appreciate you sending that to me. My address is The Jeff Kaven Show. The Jeff Cavan Show at ascensionpress.com. Gene wrote in and she said that she's been taking the Bible

timeline class for the last year and took the summer off and she said, I cannot begin to tell you what I have learned. I am a cradle Catholic and consider myself a good Catholic, but do not know the Bible at all. I'm learning and wish everyone would take this class. She's talking about the great adventure. She said, I have recently gone to your website and videos, and I cannot put my phone down or the laptop away. What a blessing. So thank you, Gene. Appreciate you sharing that. And of course, you can go to ascensionpress.com and introduce you to the whole world of Bible study, or you can go to Bible Study for Catholics.com. All the addresses will be in the show notes for you. well at this time of the year at least we are getting ready for Christmas

if you're listening to this in the middle of summer well you're still getting ready for Christmas to one degree or another but as we get together you know and as we celebrate during Advent it really turns my attention to this whole gift-giving thing and if you're like me the way that the world treats the holidays and the gifts gets a little tiresome after a while and meaningless to be frank with you at least in my life. And I look for those different gifts,

the new things that I could do to be a blessing to someone. And I want to share with you an idea that I came up with last week. Actually, I didn't come up with it last week. I was refreshed in the idea last week, but I've done this several times in my life, and that is writing your own prayer to God. And I've entitled to show, write your own holy card. Now, for those of you that are not familiar with what a holy card is, you can go to any Catholic bookstore.

You can go to online to Catholic sources, and you'll see what are called holy cards. And a holy card would be, for example, a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary on one side and a prayer to her asking for something in particular on the other side. We have this with St. Augustine, St. Francis, St. John Paul II, St. John Paul II, St. St. Teresa of Catholic. Calcutta, St. Teresa of Avala and so forth. So we've got all kinds of saints that are older brothers and sisters, and we continually ask them for prayers. But one of the things that we do as Catholics, which is good, but I don't think we have to necessarily just settle for it, is other people write these prayers for us.

They might write a prayer to St. Athanasius or to St. Gregory the Great, or to Therese, St. Therese, you know, the little flower, and they're beautiful and they're very, very meaningful. In the church, we tend to look at these wrote prayers as great prayers, prayers that most of us might not be able to come up with on our own, but since we can't or we feel we can't, we take their prayers and we adopt them and we make them our own. Yay, that's good. That's wonderful. and I've got a number of really good prayer cards that have been written by, I don't know who, but they did a good job of it. Well, those I don't know who people are people just like you, and there are people just like me.

And I remember years ago thinking to myself, I don't want to just settle for the prayers that everybody else wrote, but I would like to express my thoughts, my heart to the Lord, in prayer. that took some time to articulate and to write down. And I've had a chance to do this a number of times, and I'm going to share a holy card that I wrote asking for the prayers of St. John Paul II in my life. And it was adapted also and used at an institute here in the Twin Cities as well,

but it really started as my own prayer to St. John Paul II, asking him to pray for me. I've done this for St. Francis, St. Joseph, and the Holy Spirit, you know, lots of different prayers that I wrote down to try to communicate my heart to God or to the saints and asking them to pray. This idea really began for me years ago back when I was a Protestant pastor. When I was a Protestant pastor, we would sing all kinds of really exuberant praise songs. And we had a very talented group of musicians, a phenomenal, phenomenal pianist by the name of Jane Allison, and, you know, just a great, great crew.

So one day we came up with this idea. Instead of singing everybody else's songs, why don't we make up our own song? Better known as psalming. You've heard of the Psalms. Well, the Psalms were written by David and a few other characters. and they really express the heart of a person or a people in their predicament. And as they cry out to God, they call for a solution and they realize what God is going to do in their life. It's called psalming.

So what we did back then, this is probably 25, almost 30 years ago, is that I said to the church, I would like you all to write a song. Now, you don't have to worry about the musical part of it, but I want you to write the lyrics that express your heart. to God in your own language. And I want you to use this structure as the Psalms use, and that is where you have been, what you are going through now, and what you're calling the Lord for in terms of the predicament that you're in, what are you asking of him, and where do you see this ending in your life? So it's kind of a formula.

This is where I've been. This is what I'm going through. I'm calling out to God. This is what I foresee in the future. That you will deliver me, O Lord. So that was a beautiful formula that you can actually see in the Psalms too. So I said, I'm inviting everybody to write a Psalm or write a prayer to God. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go through those and we're going to choose one.

And we're going to submit it to the musicians and they're going to make a song out of it that we're will sing as a church going forward. So we did. The people had, I think, a month or two to do it. And finally, all of the submissions were in. There was probably 10, 15, 20. I'm something like that. My memory fails me on that. But we went through them, and we decided collectively on one song that somebody wrote. They were the words, and it was anonymous. We didn't ask people to put their names on them. The musicians ended up putting it to music. And then one Sunday came around and we announced the song and we said we're going to teach the congregation this beautiful song that was written by somebody in our church. And it ended up becoming just a

beautiful, beautiful praise song. And I remember asking who wrote it if they would stand? And a man in the church in the back stood. It was a guy that totally surprised us. Never thought that he had that in him. He wasn't particularly vocal, boisterous. He didn't share a lot. He was quiet, kind of stayed in the shadows. And yet that was the man who wrote this amazing song for our church. Now, that's where it kind of began for me as I thought, you know, if the Psalms were written, I could write a Psalm. It's not the inspired word of God, granted.

But in the area of prayer, yes, we have hundreds of really good prayers that others have written, and we adopt in our life, and they're good. But could I write a beautiful prayer to the Lord for different needs in my life? And the answer is yes. Yes, I can. And I want to encourage you during this Advent season. And once again, if you're listening to this outside of Advent, just disregard the Advent point and just do it. But for Advent to prepare for the coming of the king, for the birth of the king, I would challenge you, this Advent, to write a beautiful prayer from your heart that would express your thoughts and your longing to God. And you can write it down, and you can even put it on the opposite side of a beautiful picture

that you might find on the Internet, and you can actually get this printed at Kinkos or Office Max or Office Depot somewhere. And you can make it into literally a holy card. Now, just recently, I was inspired. My wife and I were at Mass last Sunday, and there was 10 new deacons installed and set into office, sort of speak, in our Archdiocese of St. Paul in Minneapolis. Our church has one of those deacons, and he gave the homily last Sunday. And in his homily, he mentioned, he said, as you leave in the foyer, I invite you to take one of the holy cards that commemorates my my becoming a deacon, my installation as a deacon, my ordination as a deacon.

And I thought, that's interesting, he has a holy card. He's not dead. He's not a saint, but he's got a holy card. And I thought, wow, we could probably all write something like that, that we could ask people to pray for us. And that's really where this idea for this show came from. So what I'd like to do, I'm going to take a break here. And when I come back, I'm going to share with you a holy card.

that I wrote to St. John Paul II, and then I'm going to give you some ideas on what you can do as far as writing a prayer for different instances in your life that just might be a wonderful gift to your spouse, to your children, grandchildren, or to commemorate some anniversary in your life. Now, remember a few shows ago, I spoke to you about who's in your posse.

Do you remember that? I talked about who's in your posse. Who are the people that you surround yourself with as far as saints? That was show number four, who's in your spiritual posse. This will have something to do with that, because if you've got a posse, that is, you walk with certain saints, like I walk with St. Augustine, St. Francis, Mother Teresa, St. Athanasius, St. Joseph. If I'm walking with these saints, I can also compose a prayer to them

and ask them to pray for me, and I think you can too. You're listening to The Jeff Kaven Show when we come back. We're going to talk about this prayer that I wrote to St. John Paul II and some ideas for you this Christmas in going forward. It's hard to live out your Catholic faith on your own. In fact, the Bible reveals that we need a community of people to help us on our journey of faith. If you're interested in finding that community by joining or starting a small group study, visit ascensionpress.com and sign up for a free access ascension account.

With your account, you'll get all the tools you need to start walking with others towards Christ. Welcome back to the show. We're talking this week about writing your own holy card. It doesn't mean you've died and gone to heaven, even though you might feel like that from time to time. But there's opportunity for you to take some quality time and to express your heart to a saint, to Jesus, to the Blessed Mother, Holy Spirit, God the Father, and to express your prayers as part of your contribution to the wider set of composed prayers that we celebrate as Catholics. There is nothing in canon law. There's nothing in the Bible. There's nothing in our church tradition that says you cannot write a beautiful

prayer. And I'm asking you to think about doing that for Christmas this year. Now let me share with you a prayer that I wrote to St. John Paul II, just a couple of years ago, I think it was. And it was really good to write this because not only did it force me to understand his life and his teachings a little bit better, but it really forced me to, by prayer, take these teachings of his in the kingdom of God, and to apply him to my life, and to ask him to intercede for me to help me to put these into practice. So let me share the prayer with you right now. And I'll put this, by the way, in the show notes, just to give you a little idea of the structure. And I've divided it up into four sections, okay? And the four sections, if you are,

well, I'll save it. I'll save it. I'll see if you can guess what these four paragraphs are structured according to. And I'll just see if you get it. In fact, I'm not even going to tell you on this podcast. If you think you know how I have structured this prayer, you write me at the Jeff Kaven show at ascensionpress.com. And later on in an upcoming show, I'll tell you who is right. Here's the prayer. St. John Paul, pray for me that I would come to understand God's plan of sheer goodness in my life and experience the peace and love that results from my adoption as a son. pray for me that I would more fully participate in the sacraments in liturgy, and that I would fruitfully live out God's mission in my home, my parish, and my work. I pray that my light will shine

in the world for Jesus, and that I will demonstrate that I have been crucified with Christ and no longer live for myself but for the Lord. By your example, I have come to know the importance of prayer in redemptive suffering, help me to establish a foundation of prayer and a depth of intimacy that both God and my heart thirst for. In Jesus Christ, I pray. Amen. That's the prayer I wrote to St. John Paul II and asked him to pray for me as a modern day disciple. If you think you know the four areas that I'm referring to, you go ahead and you send me an email. mill. The Jeff Kaven Show at ascensionpress.com. Now, you can write a prayer for a number of different things in your life, okay? And I'm just going to give you some examples here. That one to St. John

Paul II was a personal prayer. And I got to meet him. I covered him on EWTN for six years, and I got to meet him in his private library. And he became really a saint before he was a saint in my life, and I have always asking him to pray for me. I have other people that I think very highly of, of course, my posse that I mentioned before the break. But another one that I think very much about is my childhood pastor who became a bishop, Bishop Paul Dudley. He was a mentor to me, and he went on to be with the Lord a few years ago. But quite often throughout the day I think about him. And he brought me one time and brought my wife and myself to his kid home in Northfield, Minnesota and he went around the old farmstead and he showed us all the places that he prayed

and his parents prayed and we got like a master's degree in how to raise a family from Bishop Paul Dudley. I think I'm going to write a prayer to him. I'm going to ask him to pray for us in our family. He's another one. But let me give you some ideas. One is you can pray certainly about your life and what you're going through right now in your life. Are you going through difficulties and your marriage and your finances, your emotions, at work, whatever, your children, your grandchildren. Think of a saint or think of Jesus, you know, you got the father, son, the Holy Spirit, or one of the great saints, certainly the Blessed Virgin Mary, and compose a prayer concerning

where you're at in life right now. That might be something that you could do to prepare for the coming of the king. You could write a prayer card about your marriage, about your marriage, about your. and your spouse, and ask someone to intercede for you concerning your marriage. And maybe you want to put together a four-part, five-part, you know, paragraph prayer concerning your marriage to St. Gianna or whoever. If you have children, maybe you have four children, have you ever thought about writing a prayer card for each one of them?

A grandchildren. You have grandchildren. You could write a prayer for each one of them. My mother-in-law did something very unique for all of her grandchildren. She's very musically inclined, and she wrote a beautiful song for every one of her grandchildren, and she can sing them to this day. And if she's with them, she can sing that song to them. And it's been a beautiful gift.

Think about writing a prayer to maybe your child's namesake. You have a child by the name of, well, I'll give you my kids, Tony, Antonia. She was named after St. Anthony and Mother Teresa, Tony Teresa, Antonia Teresa. Well, we could write a prayer to Mother Teresa and ask her to pray for our daughter and give that to our daughter. Be a wonderful, a wonderful gift. What about writing a prayer for your upcoming wedding anniversary or the anniversary of your baptism? or birthday coming up? Or what about writing a prayer for Christmas coming up for your kids

or for your friends or the people you group with in a small group? That would be kind of a nice idea. The new year is coming about. Of course, we just began the new year at Advent in the church, but the world is beginning a new year on January 1st. Maybe you've got a prayer for the upcoming year that you'd like to write for your family, kids, colleagues at work, whatever it might. be. But you can do that. And so there's a lot of ideas, you know, on how you can be creative about

it. Now, here's what I would suggest that you do, because I know right away you're thinking, oh, I can ever write something like that. You would be surprised at what comes out of your heart and your mind. Maybe this has happened to you. I was downstairs by my office a few weeks ago, and I was going through some old boxes of college work and, you know, writings and papers and things like that. And I opened it up and I was starting to read some of the papers I wrote in college. And as I was reading it, I was thinking, wow, this is good. This is really, really good. And then I thought to myself, I don't think I could do this again. This is really, really good. I was writing about Marxism and Christianity and Lenin and Dostoevsky and all their thoughts in Russia,

and just all kinds of unusual things I was writing. But I kept thinking, man, I don't think I can do this again. this is really, really good. Has that ever happened to you where you write something and go back to it years later and think, that isn't half bad? Well, you know what? You've got it in you. If you really take the time to think and to pray and to articulate your heart to the Lord, don't worry about rhyming and all of that, but to make it a real heartfelt prayer for you or a loved one, you would be surprised at what you come up with. And once you do, if you want to be a real heartfelt prayer, make it official, find a beautiful picture of that saint and print on the back of that picture your prayer and then you can give it to a loved one or keep it for yourself if it's for you.

Like my prayer to St. John Paul II, that's my prayer to St. John Paul II. But if I wrote one to my daughter, I would give her that card. I wrote a prayer card for you. This is what I'm praying for you. And this is, see, this is something that they can take with them. life, even when you're gone, and you're praying from heaven, they have something in their hand. Now, I want to ask you, I want to ask you to do this, and I want to see what you wrote. I won't use your name if you don't want me to. Don't worry about it. You're going to be Mrs. Anonymous. But if you write a prayer to a certain saint, can I share that with my listening audience. I love to do that. And I think that this will spawn more prayers and ignite more of a

passion for this big church and the communion of saints that we belong to. And I think it's one of the greatest gifts that we could give at Christmas is the gift of our heart and our prayers for our loved ones. So I encourage you to do that. And you can send it to me at the Jeff Kaven show at ascensionpress.com. All of this. will be in the show notes. I really look forward to hearing from you. So let me close in prayer. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Lord, I thank you. I thank you for my friends who are listening, my family members who are listening. And I pray that you, Lord, would ignite a passion for prayer in our life during this Advent as we await your birth, your coming.

And Lord, give us the ideas that we need to attend to as far as prayer for loved ones, whether it be children, grandchildren, our spouse, a colleague at work, our parish priest, the DRE, our bishop. And let us, Lord, from the depths of our heart, pull out the truth and the passion that we have for you and for this great family called the Church. We thank you for helping us to write and to express our hearts in Jesus' name. Amen. Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Thank you.