In support of "rote prayers"

[IrishAm]

I’ve stopped worrying about it.

I often hear people complain about how prayers such as the Rosary are just rote prayers that don’t mean anything. Babbling words without thought.

I have to admit, there are many times when my mind wanders during the two Rosary sequences I pray each day. Sometimes I get from one mystery to the other without even remembering that I did because my mind was elsewhere.

And, you know what? That’s okay. Now, if those were the ONLY prayers I said, it wouldn’t be. And if I NEVER prayed, or even SELDOM prayed, the Rosary with full attention and devotion, it wouldn’t be okay either.

But – even with my mind going hither and yon – I am still consiously starting and ending my day with God on my mind. I am joining with the angels and saints and my fellow sinners in hope and in faith.

(And I do try to pay attention to the meditations I invoke and the words I speak . . . )

 

[JoeSchmeau]

I’ve stopped worrying about it.

Same here. Apologetics are important, but I think it’s easier to share your faith by the way that you live your life! Don’t sweat the small stuff.

 

[allhers]

I know what you mean, the Holy Rosary is a beautiful meditation when done correctly, but we often fall short, just as we do in everything else, but…we just get up and keep trying. I absolutely love it when I am before the Most Blessed Sacrament at Adoration and no one else is there and I pray the Holy Rosary and am just lost in the Mysteries. I’m going to have to go more often all by myself. (of course I won’t be alone though).

 

[Trishie]

And Jesus composed the “Lord’s prayer”!..which we recite by rote, and with the heart. So Jesus knows the value of a prayer-focus!

In her autobiography St Therese admits to wandering thoughts; and when her distractions concerned other people, she offered the distractions as prayer for them. “In my ‘little way every thing is most ordinary; all that I do, little souls must be able to do likewise." (Saint Therese of Lisieux)

Who was it that said, “pray as you can, not as you can’t”? Prayer is a grace, however it presents in us, vocal, contemplative or a natural chat to God, or simple thoughts of Him.

“Glory to Him whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” [Ephesians 3:20] , “I am no longer trying for perfection by my own efforts…but I only want the perfection that comes through faith in Christ, and is from God and based on faith.” [Philippians 3:9]

The “Spirit…comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit Himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what He means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God.” [Romans 8:26, 27]

 

[fhansen]

In the Protestant churches I attended before coming back to the CC, we kind of prided ourselves in our ability to come up with “spontaneous” prayers which somehow didn’t always sound so original after awhile, especially when you had to come up with something profound on the spot and weren’t feeling so spontaneous. But while there are prayers which are truly initiated by the Holy Spirit and there are simple prayers of petition which come from our hearts, I, too, have come to love and appreciate the rote prayers we’ve been given which don’t require effort or originality on my part-maybe just a little more humility.

 

[BarbaraTherese]

Same here. Apologetics are important, but I think it’s easier to share your faith by the way that you live your life! Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Great answer! I was reading a book the other night that quotes St. Teresa of Avila and one of our great saints, mystics, Doctors of The Church and an author…where she states that no matter how ‘high’ our prayer state may be that there will probably be always a need to return to ‘lower’ states of prayer and never to disdain these other states. Don’t sweat the small stuff! Be where you are and be thankful for it…since we cannot even utter the name of The Lord, let alone strive to love and serve Him unless He gave us the Grace to do so, drawing us. St. Teresa also wrote that the most direct and sure way to Unity is through love of neighbour…ie. to quote JoeSchmeau (cute tag or user name! ) “share your faith by the way you live your life”…or as St. Francis of Assisi said “preach the Gospel and with words if you must”.

 

[SuscipeMeDomine]

There are two things that strike me as particularly good about memorized prayers.

The first is that sometimes you’re in a situation where you can’t really think – perhaps an emergency or some kind of very profound situation where your mind isn’t quite working. Those are times when you can fall back on an Our Father, Hail Mary, or other memorized prayer.

The second is that you can pray with other people and have something more to say than “amen.” My friend and I stopped at the funeral home to see my mother one last time before her funeral. There came the time that I knew we had to leave but it was so hard to walk away. He suggested that we pray a Hail Mary together before we left. There was great comfort in praying together and leaving her with our prayers.

 

[Flopfoot]

Seconding all of the above. Rote prayers are great. Gets around the problem of “I can’t pray because I can’t think of anything to say”. The words are beautiful. Also in the rosary they are used to free up the mind to meditate on the mysteries so it’s like you’re praying “double” - once for the words once for the meditation. The Our Father > all other prayers, I made a slight attempt to “prove” this in another thread.

 

[JimR-OCDS]

The purpose of rote prayer isn’t the prayer itself, but rather, the intention of our will toward God.

So, when we say the Rosary, its not the Hail Mary’s that draw our attention, but the mysteries that we’re meditating on.

The prayers of the Hail Mary become so routine, that you can say them, without thinking about them.

In the book, “The Way of the Pilgrim,” the pilgrim travels through Russia, trying to understand the verse from Scripture, "Pray unceasingly. He doesn’t understand how this is possible, so goes on a quest to find out. He visits monasteries and me known for holiness, to learn from them, how to do this. Each time, he’s given the task of saying Jesus Prayer on his Rosary bead, a various number of times. One Abbot tells him to say the Jesus Prayer, 5000 times per day. Obediently, he does so, in addition to reading Scripture and the Philikalia. Eventually, begins to feel God’s presence in his prayer time, when he’s not even aware he’s saying the words. When he’s walking, the Jesus prayer constantly merges up inside, and he finds that he’s praying almost constantly. As he prays, he has a sense of God’s presence and he comes to the point that just the thought of God, the Jesus Prayer comes to life from his depths. He begins to realize that it isn’t the words of the prayer that are effecting his heart, but rather the presence of God, but its the prayer that directs his will toward God.

So it is with our rote prayers. Said often enough and with devotion, they become part of our everyday existence to the point that we are praying, unceasingly.

God Bless
Jim

 

[TOP]

The purpose of rote prayer isn’t the prayer itself, but rather, the intention of our will toward God.

So, when we say the Rosary, its not the Hail Mary’s that draw our attention, but the mysteries that we’re meditating on.

The prayers of the Hail Mary become so routine, that you can say them, without thinking about them.

In the book, “The Way of the Pilgrim,” the pilgrim travels through Russia, trying to understand the verse from Scripture, "Pray unceasingly. He doesn’t understand how this is possible, so goes on a quest to find out. He visits monasteries and me known for holiness, to learn from them, how to do this. Each time, he’s given the task of saying Jesus Prayer on his Rosary bead, a various number of times. One Abbot tells him to say the Jesus Prayer, 5000 times per day. Obediently, he does so, in addition to reading Scripture and the Philikalia. Eventually, begins to feel God’s presence in his prayer time, when he’s not even aware he’s saying the words. When he’s walking, the Jesus prayer constantly merges up inside, and he finds that he’s praying almost constantly. As he prays, he has a sense of God’s presence and he comes to the point that just the thought of God, the Jesus Prayer comes to life from his depths. He begins to realize that it isn’t the words of the prayer that are effecting his heart, but rather the presence of God, but its the prayer that directs his will toward God.

So it is with our rote prayers. Said often enough and with devotion, they become part of our everyday existence to the point that we are praying, unceasingly.

God Bless
Jim

What a very interesting explanation Jim. This post confirms a 2 year old question for me. Thanks, Tim

 

[Erich]

From The Scandal of the Decades,

If it were wrong to use repetitive prayers, Jesus certainly would not have done it. Yet in the garden of Gethsemane, he spoke the same prayer three times: “Leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words” (Matt. 26:44). We cannot think of this repetition as anything but heartfelt.

Similarly, in the Old Testament, parts of Psalm 118 are structured around the repeated phrase “His steadfast love endures forever,” and the book of Daniel presents the three men in the fiery furnace constantly repeating the phrase “Sing praise to him and highly exalt him forever” (Dan. 3:52–88). God looks favorably on their prayers and answers them in their time of need (Ps. 118:21; Dan. 3:94–95).

In the New Testament, the book of Revelation describes how the very worship of God in heaven includes words of holy praise that are repeated without end. The four living creatures, gathered around God’s throne, “never cease to sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!’”(Rev. 4:8). Although trying to manipulate God by vain repetition is always wrong, proper repetitious prayer is very biblical and pleasing to God.

 

[reen12]

quote: IrishAm

I often hear people complain about how prayers such as the Rosary are just rote prayers that don’t mean anything. Babbling words without thought.

I have to admit, there are many times when my mind wanders during the two Rosary sequences I pray each day. Sometimes I get from one mystery to the other without even remembering that I did because my mind was elsewhere.

And, you know what? That’s okay. Now, if those were the ONLY prayers I said, it wouldn’t be. And if I NEVER prayed, or even SELDOM prayed, the Rosary with full attention and devotion, it wouldn’t be okay either.

But – even with my mind going hither and yon – I am still consiously starting and ending my day with God on my mind. I am joining with the angels and saints and my fellow sinners in hope and in faith.

(And I do try to pay attention to the meditations I invoke and the words I speak . . . )

Hello, IrishAm. I well remember reading C.S.Lewis - speaking of
memorized prayers. He said that he had come to learn that
one has to budget for those times when we are too fatigued
to pray, in our own words. This is when “rote” prayers are a blessing. We can lift our mind and heart to God, through the charity of another, who composed the prayers.

A corollary to this is: I never realized, until I lost a blessed
friend [she was only 59] that the mind can be too
numbed to pray or even to listen to what is being said, at a
funeral mass. And that’s when I realized, too, how very
much we need the prayers of others - in that, at that moment,
they were praying in my ‘place’ - for I could not. I was in shock.

This was the moment when I realized how much we all
need one another, as brothers and sisters, in the life of grace.

reen12