Why We Pray

As we celebrate Christmas, the most familiar of stories, we should be aware that its very familiarity can numb us to its importance: the center of all prayer, the mystery of the Incarnation, when God submitted himself to the human form in the radical dependency of a newborn’s pure petition.

Last week, the Catholic News Agency published some new statistics from the Pew Research Center. “How often do you pray?” asked the survey. 51% of Catholics in the United States responded that they prayed every day, 29% of them weekly or monthly, and 20% of them seldom or never. The percentage of those praying daily had fallen from 59% in 2014, which sounds bad. On the other hand, saying how often one prays is fairly meaningless without further distinctions. I suspect that Pew means something minimal. Some respondents might consider that they “pray every day” if they say grace before meals or read a little scripture in the morning, whereas others would consider themselves remiss if they have not read scripture, devoted half an hour to mental prayer, attended daily Mass, and said the rosary with their families at night. St. Paul urges Christians to pray without ceasing, and the more someone prays, the more he or she might come to feel that anything short of holding themselves as much as possible in the presence of God is not praying as they should—even if they experience years of dryness, as many saints report.

Taken at face value in the Pew survey, the percentages of people who pray correspond to the percentages in answer to another question: “How important is religion in your life?” 48% of my fellow Catholics said it was very important, 34% said it was somewhat important. 18% said it was not important at all. They must mean they were brought up “culturally” Catholic and haven’t cared to distance themselves from that identity. They are part of the 33% of all adults in the United States who never pray.

I am always moved by the prayerfulness of our students at Wyoming Catholic College—their reverent attendance at daily Mass or Divine Liturgy, for example. On the eve of the arguments on abortion presented in the Supreme Court on Dec. 1, they organized all-night adoration. Their practice contrasts sharply with the 33% who never pray, which would have included me at their age.

For about 10 years, starting in my early teens, it never even occurred to me to pray. I had been brought up on weekly Sunday School and church in a Methodist household. I knew the Lord’s Prayer, of course, and I admired an elderly former pastor in the congregation who, when called upon, would stand up at the evening service and pray with great extemporaneous eloquence. But by 10th grade I had been enlightened, so to speak, by the culture’s serious adulation of progress and technology. Darwin had shown me the truth about human origins, and I had accepted the atheistic paradigm that seemed to me the upshot of modern science. Imagine a metaphysically closed space where the fundamental questions of being and existence are not permitted. Call this enclosed space the self, the “ego-drama,” as Bishop Barron calls it, or what you will. This enclosure might afford immense knowledge, a universe’s breadth and depth and range and variety; it might be infinitely explorable; it might present itself artistically in rich detail, like the provincial France of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, splendidly imagined, but metaphysically opaque. This was the world I lived in, capacious in theory, but morally claustrophobic, with no opening to the fundamental basis of wonder and truth outside my own relations as a self among selves who had to make up any local meaning there might be.

What does it mean to pray? Countless books have been written on the subject, two of my recent favorites being Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Prayer and Fr. Thomas Dubay’s Fire Within.

Strange to say, I remember first experiencing prayer in my mid-20s. I had begun to be drawn toward Catholicism in college through Flannery O’Connor; at a junior college, I had taught selections of St. Augustine’s Confessions as well as Dante’s Divine Comedy in a world literature class. On my own, I had read a good deal of C.S. Lewis as well as Josef Pieper’s Guide to Thomas Aquinas. But even so, I had not prayed, by which I mean I had not made the essential gesture of belief, which is hard to describe. It reminds me, though, of the episode in the Gospels when men make a hole in the roof to lower a paralytic into the presence of Jesus. A hole in the roof of self-enclosure and also access to the inmost of all Presence: that might explain the giddiness I felt, as though there had been something that simply needed to be broken through.

For all of us, something in the heart and the mind needs to be broken through every time. In this week of the year, we celebrate Christmas, the most familiar of stories. Its very familiarity can numb us to its importance: the center of all prayer, the mystery of the Incarnation, when God submitted himself to the human form in the radical dependency of a newborn’s pure petition. What does it take to clear away our familiarity with the story, to tear open the roof of habit, so to speak, and let that wonder in, like a spill of angels? It is why we pray.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.

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