A MAP for Life

A call to men to pray

The great Frank Sheed once wrote a great book called A Map for Life. This post is not about that book, though I think every Catholic, and indeed every Christian and everyone else, too, should read it.

The MAP to which I refer is something I am calling the Men’s Apostolate of Prayer.

Now this may seem a bit strange: there are right now, after all, dozens, if not more, of apostolates directed to the formation of men. Exodus 90 is the program that comes immediately to my mind. It takes men through the Book of Exodus in 90 days in order to introduce them to basic Christian disciplines and to teach them the principles of asceticism, prayer, and fraternity. I’m about to do a second round of St. Michael’s Lent with Exodus 90, too. Though its intended audience is men aged 25-45, the scope of its reach extends far beyond that demographic. It is a powerful program. That Man is You is another example. Initially designed to help Catholic men become better husbands and fathers, it has become, it seems to me, a general program of Christian formation for men. It thrives when pastors support it; and it seems to reach men older than 45, though younger men are present, too. And these are just two about which I know something.

This is to say nothing of great men’s organizations, some old and some new, that seek to form men and give shape and direction to their Christian lives.

I am calling for something else. I am calling for Catholic men to sit down with the Bible, right after their morning offerings, and use the sacred page as the primary text for their morning prayer. You can do this whether you are a member of those great men’s organizations, or those apostolates and ministries specifically directed toward men, or in a co-ed organization or apostolate — or if you are in none at all.

Why would I call for this? My own shelves are full of devotionals, Scriptural commentaries, sermons, books of meditations, and the like, all of which make for great material for prayer. Why not use those instead?

Well, you can, of course, and it’s good to rely upon the Fathers, Doctors, and saints of the Church, and those who know them well, in order to help us pray. My call is for those who want something more, who have come to believe that the commentaries, meditations, etc. are too dry, too remote, or somehow not exactly relevant to what is going on in their lives right now — or else who want a more immediate contact with the living Word. “The Word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword,” the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us in the fourth chapter, and while the primary reference is to Jesus Christ, who is the Word of God Incarnate, the Church has always taken this text as a reference to the Holy Scriptures. When we are in contact with the Scriptures, we are in contact with Christ.

The Word of God is a living Word, and He speaks to us through the Word of the text.

Whoa, wait a minute, isn’t that a Protestant idea? Well, not really. The ones who taught us to meditate on the sacred texts were the monks. St. Jerome, translator of the Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek into Latin taught us summarily, “ignorance of the Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” The Benedictines gave us the four-fold practice of lectio divina, divine reading: first, read the text; then, meditate upon it — consider it, ruminate upon it, savor it; then, pray with the text and about it — use the text as the primary fuel for your own personal prayer; and finally, if the Lord grants it, contemplate it, contemplation being a sort of wordless communion with the Word through the Word in which, when it occurs, time is suspended and one has a beginning taste of the bliss of eternal life in heaven. St. Bernard taught his sons, and, through his writings, the rest of us, to meet the Word through the Word: that the Bible as the Word of God leads us to Christ, who is the Word of God, and, following the Desert Fathers, that theology is theology only if it is mysticism: only if it is prayed. He was not the only monastic to do so, but he did it in a way like none other. St. Ignatius taught us to place ourselves within the Gospel scenes, becoming another character in the events, learning to see them from the inside, and then to see our own lives, and all of life, from within the Gospel. A modern approach to contemplative prayer, including the usage of Holy Scripture, is David Torkington’s work, available through amazon.com or his website. He was a Franciscan for a stretch.

So now that we’ve established that prayer using the Bible as our sourcebook is eminently Catholic, why am I calling for a Men’s Apostolate of Prayer, especially when there are men’s programs available? It’s because I think what men need most right now, and what the Church needs of men right now, is to have direct contact with the living Word, without any other program save the conversation between the Lord and the man that both want to have. We don’t need another program. We need an intimate life with the Lord.

Put another way, the goal of prayer is prayer. Nothing happens without it; everything good proceeds from it; and we men need to develop confidence in the fact that when we pray, with the Word, the Lord hears us. We need to develop confidence in prayer being a thing not just for priests, or religious, or women and children, but for us, too, and maybe, right now, most of all, since we are, I dare to say, the ones who pray the least. I’d go so far to say that things in the Church and in the world would be very different indeed if there were multitudes of Catholic men in daily, personal, individual, intimate contact with the incarnate Word through the written Word. In fact it is the Lord drawing us to His Word that impels me to write this column.

Prayer is communion with God; the Eucharist is the communion of the Church in communion with God mediated through Holy Communion. And the Lord is the protagonist of the Eucharist. Let Him be the protagonist of your prayer. Let the Lord establish the program. Let the agenda be His. We come to Him with our concerns, needs, desires, hopes, and all the rest; when we meet Him in prayer, He shares his concerns, desires, and hopes for us, with us. As each soul is unique, each conversation is unique. It’s learning to have the conversation with the Lord that is important here.

If you’re not praying the Rosary daily, you should be: the Rosary is a contemplation of the Life of Christ led by Her Who knew Him better than anyone else ever did or will. If you’re going to Mass on a frequent basis, keep that up: you’ll find that as you receive the Word more fruitfully in your personal prayer, you’ll receive the Sacrament more fruitfully at Mass or in Confession. If you pray the Liturgy of the Hours, great: keep that up, as it will teach you to pray with the mind of the Church. If you still want to pray with a devotional, a book of meditation, or some other source, also great: but put the Bible first, and make the mental prayer the very first thing you do after your morning offering.

It’s the mental prayer, that daily conversation with God, fueled by direct contact with Him in Holy Scripture, that will turn on all the lights, fire up all the cylinders, show us the Lord’s will for us, and give us the means — the grace, wisdom, and power — to get the job done. It’s the mental prayer that will give contour and depth to all the other spiritual practices you are keeping.

But I stress that the prayer is not instrumental. We don’t pray because we want the goodies that we think we want or know we need, or to fulfill some external program we may have adopted. We pray because we love God, and because we want to know and love him more. Knowing him and loving him leads to more service, yes: but that’s not the point. And when “more service” is made the point, the prayer dries up, because then we have fallen into the trap of trying to use it for our own ends. The point, rather, is to love the Giver of Gifts for His own sake: that’s what we learn in the prayer.

So where to begin? You can ask the Lord what book He would have you pray with, and see what comes to mind. You can pray your way through the Bible, beginning with Genesis. You can pick a book that’s always attracted you. You could pick a Gospel or Epistle—maybe a favorite, maybe one you don’t know so well.

The point is freedom. “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” You are free: you have been set free. You can lose your freedom by returning to the habits and vices that enslaved you before you experienced divine liberation. Or you can grow in your freedom. I can guarantee you that if you offer your prayer with the Word through the mediation of the Word of God written, and in communion with the Church — frequenting the sacraments, practicing the usual devotions — you will grow in freedom. A tree planted by streams of living water grows.

Just pick up the text.

Many years ago, when I was just learning to pray with Scripture, I was reading a passage from the Old Testament book of Ruth. “Why,” you might ask. It was the appointed reading for the day, taken from the Daily Office (the Liturgy of the Hours). I remember reading the passage and thinking that this was good and beautiful and all, and then asking the question, “but how is this Your word to me today?” Maybe it seems like a bold question, but we are in a relationship with the Almighty and in relationships, it’s good to ask and answer questions and to give and receive answers. My answer came later in the day. I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember that something happened later that day and I had that moment of recognition when the meaning of that Scripture came alive.

Well, that happened when I was still Protestant. I became a Catholic and, like most dutiful Catholics, started to rely upon prayer books and books of meditations for my sources for my mental prayer. All good stuff — and I found myself lingering over the passages that quoted Holy Writ directly — “The Word of God is alive and powerful….”
Somehow, though, I drifted away from praying with the text of Scripture directly — and the drift had its effects.

What has happened since I started praying directly with the text? I’m sure you’ve seen photos of a desert after a rainstorm. It doesn’t take long before the entire desert is in bloom, with vibrancy and color and verve and refreshment. The Word of God is like that — “all flesh is grass,” the Prophet Isaiah records the word of the Lord in chapter 40, and continues with the message, “the grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God will stand forever.”

So, too, will those who root themselves in that word. “Blessed is the man,” the first psalm tells us, whose “delight is in the law of the Lord…He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.”

Jesus, that blessed Man par excellence, tells us, as recorded in John’s Gospel, that He is the vine and we are the branches and we bear fruit when we stay rooted in Him.

Daily meditation with and upon the Word of God, with frequent reception of the sacraments, will revolutionize your life and unleash in you forces to praise, to love, and to serve that you do not yet know you have. Don’t take my word for it: put me to the test. Take up the Scripture and use it for your mental prayer for a month and see what happens. Your marriage and family life will change.  Your life in the parish will change.  Your business life will change.  You will flourish as you never have before, and your wife, children, family, and friends will respond in ways you cannot foresee.

The Lord keeps His promises, but He needs us to do our part. We can answer this call, and flourish.

More to come.