prayer

prayer. ‘Prayer, properly speaking, is a petition which we make to God for the things which pertain to our salvation; but it is also taken in another, broader sense to mean any raising of the heart to God’ (Luis of Granada). Prayer in the sense of petition is a universal phenomenon, wherever people believe they are dependent on some higher power outside their control. Until well into the Middle Ages no other meaning was normally envisaged. The extended meaning, taking in all sorts of ‘raising of the heart to God’, dates from the late Middle Ages, and in some circles there has been a tendency to devalue petitionary prayer.

In antiquity prayer usually involved spoken words and gestures. The Church soon recognized that prayer need not be spoken aloud; the medieval monastic tradition increasingly stressed silent prayer, which became common among the laity also. Prayer may be offered privately by an individual or publicly in a formal act of worship. Christ taught His disciples to call God ‘Father’ and He taught them what to pray, though Christian tradition is unanimous in not confining prayer to the words of the Lord's Prayer. According to Origen, prayer should be made only to the Father through Christ, but prayer to Christ has been common from early times and subsequently prayer to the Holy Spirit was introduced. To the conceptual problem that God knows what man needs better than man does and from the beginning of time has already determined what He will do, St Thomas Aquinas provides the classic answer: in prayer man is not trying to force God's will; he is submitting his desires to Him; he does not pray in the hope of changing God's mind, but in order to co-operate with Him in bringing about certain effects which He has foreordained; prayer is a secondary cause, itself caused by God.

The early monastic tradition stressed the need for purity in prayer: in prayer the mind must be fixed on God without distraction. To facilitate this concentration short, intense prayer was recommended. Some E. writers recommend that a single formula of prayer, preferably containing the name of Jesus, should be adopted and used all the time. In the W. the tradition of short intense prayer persisted until near the end of the Middle Ages, but from the 15th cent. longer regular periods of private prayer were sought. From the 14th cent. contemplation and meditation are sometimes treated as parts or forms of prayer. Thereafter various kinds of prayer came to be identified, such as ‘discursive prayer’, ‘affective prayer’, and ‘contemplative prayer’, and these are sometimes systematized as successive stages of prayer. Praise, thanksgiving, and confession also came to be regularly seen as parts of prayer.

Prayer to the BVM and other saints is attested early. It is theologically different from prayer to God, being properly a request for the prayers of the saints. Its legitimacy is denied by Protestants.