The word "prayer" gets a bad wrap, you know? It's kind of sad. Because when you actually talk about it with people, I haven't come face to face with a lot of people who would tell me that prayer is an inherently bad thing. In fact, they don't even find it annoying when they really think about it. But, somehow, whenever someone says, in passing, "I'll pray for you," or every time someone starts up a Rosary, I think the majority of us tend to inhale rather sharply. And no one seems to know why.
It's one of those unfortunate facts of life that we tend to look on prayer as something of an over-pious activity, especially when we're in high school. I went through it. My parents went through it. Their parents went through it. Of course, there are those who take to it like ducks to water, but there will always be those who look sideways at those ducks.
Most of us have this picture in our heads of "prayer" being kneeling with your head bowed reciting incantations, and the first thing we all say when we imagine it that way is that we simply don't have time for that. We are getting to the point where the ticking of the clock is beginning to rule our lives, and we have things to do and places to be, doggone it!
One of my dad's favorite prayers was a two-word one used in the famous musical, "The Sound of Music," when Maria first arrives at that big mansion and it suddenly hits her just how terrifying her situation is. It goes like this:
"Oh help."
Best. Prayer. Ever.
We need to stop thinking of prayer as this exclusively incantation-related thing. True, some of the most powerful forms of prayer (for example, the Rosary, Divine Mercy Chaplet, heck, even the Our Father and Hail Mary), and certainly the most well-known, come in this format. But the fact of the matter is we need to be praying with our very lives. With our actions and our works. For that matter, there are hundreds of forms of prayer--seriously...hundreds. What we need to do, especially now that we're old enough to understand the concept of prayer, is find a form of prayer that works for us. Journaling? Service? Straight-up daily Rosaries?
Try them all on for size. Find what works, find what doesn't work. But pray. Never stop praying.
Much love!
Ceci Galvin
CYM
