James Martin - In All Seasons, For All Reasons: Praying Throughout the Year

A Give Us This Day Book
published by Liturgical Press

Cover design by Ann Blattner

2017 by James Martin, SJ. Published by Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, microfilm, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any other means, known or yet unknown, for any purpose except brief quotations in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint Johns Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Martin, James, 1960 author.

Title: In all seasons, for all reasons : praying throughout the year / James Martin, SJ.

Description: Collegeville, Minnesota : Liturgical Press, 2017. | A Give Us This Day book.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017020634 (print) | LCCN 2017008795 (ebook) | ISBN 9780814645314 (ebook) | ISBN 9780814645079

Subjects: LCSH: PrayerChristianity. | Catholic ChurchDoctrines.

Classification: LCC BV210.3 (print) | LCC BV210.3 .M365 2017 (ebook) | DDC 248.3/2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020634

L ord, teach us to pray (Luke 11:1). It is the simple request of a disciple who wants to learn from his Master. John the Baptist, it seems, had taught his disciples to pray. And Jesus followers had seen him withdraw to pray, many times. Indeed, Jesus prays so frequently in Lukes Gospel it is sometimes called the Gospel of Prayer. And Jesus is happy to teach his disciples: When you pray, say Father, hallowed be your name.

One of the most surprising aspects of the Our Father is that much of it is petitionary. I mention this because petitionary prayer sometimes gets a bad rap in spiritual circles. Many people have told me that they feel they shouldnt ask for things in prayer: its too selfish, they say.

Yet Jesus asks us to ask. He is confident before the Father in prayer, and he encourages us to ask for what we need: our daily bread, of course, but also deliverance from evil and temptation.

And whom are we asking? Not some far-off, impersonal God, but our Father. Now, the very word Father can be difficult for some people. Some have, or had, fathers who were cruel, judgmental, or even abusive. Also, the language can seem sexistafter all, God has no gender. But Jesus father is the tenderhearted Abba, an Aramaic word roughly translated as Dad. A few years ago in Jerusalem, I saw a young girl running to catch up with her father, shouting, Abba! Abba! It is to this loving parent that we turn when we pray the Our Father.

So ask away, and remember that youre asking your Abba.

T he first prayer I learned as a boy was the Hail Mary. (Dont ask me why it wasnt the Our Father: maybe it had something to do with not attending a Catholic school!) Sometimes when I wanted help from God, I would pray the Hail Mary on the way to school, my feet hitting the sidewalk in sync with the prayers cadence: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee...

Mainly I used the prayer as a kind of payment for what I wanted from God. The bigger the favor from God, the more Hail Marys I would say.

Not until I was a Jesuit novice was I able to appreciate the underlying beauty of the prayer, and was able to see it as a twofold prayer, of Scripture and tradition. The first part of the prayer is taken almost directly from the greeting of the angel Gabriel to Mary in the Gospel of Luke. The second part of the prayer is a brief compendium of Marian tradition, which invokes one of her traditional titles, Mother of God, and asks for her prayers.

Some of us (myself included) recite the Hail Mary almost as if in a trancefor example, when we say the Rosaryperhaps without pausing to reflect on the beauty of the individual words. But thats okay, as long as this ancient prayer reminds us that we are asking for the aid of someone who has long been listening to human hopes and desires.

Whether we are a child asking for help at school or a sick or elderly person at the hour of our death, Mary hears our prayer. And prays for us.

T he Rosary, one of the oldest forms of Catholic prayer, has been a popular devotion in the Catholic Church since roughly the fifteenth century. Originally this circlet of beads enabled laypeople to pray along with monastic communities. (The 150 individual prayers mirror the 150 psalms. There are 10 Hail Marys in each decade of the Rosary, and there are five decades each for the sorrowful, joyful, and glorious mysteries. That is: 10 x 5 x 3 = 150.)

Briefly put, one begins the Rosary with the Apostles Creed, and then prays a Hail Mary for each of the small beads and an Our Father for each of the larger ones. Along the way, one meditates on various events (mysteries) in the lives of Mary and Jesus.

Such rote or repetitive prayers are sometimes dismissed by sophisticated Catholics. Yet believers can use the Rosary in many ways: slowly meditating on the words of the beautiful prayers, pondering the lives of Mary and Jesus (one person described the Rosary as Marys photo album), or using the rote prayers as a mantra to quiet oneself in order to enter more deeply into Gods presence. For me, the Rosary helps when its hard to concentrate, and the familiar prayers Ive known since childhood are an unfailing comfort.

As an elderly woman once told her Jesuit son, When I pray the Rosary, I look at God, and God looks at me.

M ost Catholics are familiar with Marian devotions, especially the Rosaryeven if some may misunderstand these practices.