Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God.

St. John Damascene

The Merton Prayer

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end,
nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.

And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,

though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though
I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.

St. Therese of Lisieux

Three Steps of Prayer

St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa)

1. Clear 'Rubble'

To enter prayer, we first need to remove the 'rubble', to turn from all that is contrary to the Holy Spirit, so that the pure spring of living prayer may begin to well up within us, even to the point of becoming a foretaste of eternal life. We all possess the promised Fountain of Living Waters. Most of us have covered up that living Spring with layers of debris, such that the Spirit's stream has become only a trickle. We have allowed the voice of the Spirit's prayer to become stifled within us and have admitted many other this-worldly voices to occupy our attention and our hearts. So, we need to clear away whatever is merely human whatever is not God, in order to create an inner space of silence and solitude, free from worry, resentment, impatience, desires, and plans.

2. Open to Spirit

The next step is the all important act of faith that places us in contact with the source of living waters within us - Christ. In that moment our prayer becomes his and his prayer becomes ours. Remember that the act of faith is not a feeling. It can be a graced help to be touched by feelings of God's presence, but our feelings are not God. Only faith touches God directly and deeply. We need not panic if we feel that "nothing is happening" any more than we would grow concerned at not feeling our blood circulating through our body. We know the blood is circulating, and we go about our business just as securely as when we can feel our heart pumping. We know that the spirit of Jesus is always at work within us, and we go about our prayer just as securely as when we can feel his presence.

3. Surrender in and to Love

The last element in prayer is to pour ourselves out in harmony with the Spirit in surrender and self-gift. God's thirst, which we meet in prayer, always expresses itself as a gift to us. Similarly, our thirst for him that we express in prayer takes the form of self-gift. This self-gift can be expressed in many ways - as communion, as praise and adoration, as reparation, or as intercession".

Excerpt from I Thirst: 40 Days with Mother Teresa by Joseph Langford, M.C., pp.37-38

If we only "say" prayers, then naturally you may not be praying. To pray means to be completely united to Jesus in such a way as to allow Him to pray in us, for us, through us! This cleaving to each other, Jesus and I, is prayer. We are all called to pray like this.

Mother Teresa, (Letter, 1983)

Learning true prayer means learning to die in the sense Jesus meant by this: dying to egotism, self-determination, and self-achieving, and letting God recreate us in love in a way that only God can do.

Ruth Burrows, (Essence of Prayer, 2006)

St. Teresa of Avila's 9 Grades of Prayer

There are many approaches to prayer and meditation and we will be presenting a variety from which you may select what works best for you. In the previous section, St. Teresa of Calcutta provided us with a simple three-step formula for "how to" pray.

A more advanced, structured and thorough approach to prayer, meditation, and contemplation is aligned with stages of spiritual growth providing a "system" to the spiritual journey. St. Teresa of Avila did just that. She was a sixteenth century cloistered Carmelite nun who is now recognized as a Doctor of the Catholic Church for her insightful spirituality and her ability to describe the spiritual journey as it had evolved out of her devotional, contemplative life and action as a leader and reformer of the Carmelite order. Her writings include her autobiography, the text, The Perfect Way, which shares the rules or "plan" for living a spiritual life, and The Interior Castle, her most influential writing where she describes three stages of spiritual growth and nine grades of prayer attributed to those stages where she uses the levels and rooms of a castle to describe them. It may seem overly complicated but it does offer insight into ones various twists and turns in spiritual growth.

The nine grades of prayer are named as follows:

Vocal Prayer
Meditation
Affective Prayer
Acquired Recollection
Infused Contemplation
Prayer of Quiet
Simple Union
Conforming Union
Transforming Union

Click to access a video course on:

9 Grades of Prayer

Connie Rossini, a scholar on Catholic Spirituality and meditative prayer practitioner describes in her article: Teresa Of Avila On Silence In Prayer (Part II Of III) the traditional Christian teachings on stages of prayer and the role of active mind vs. silence through these stages. (Part 1: Should

We Sit Quietly During Prayer?; Part 3: The Silence of Detachment)

1. The first stage of Christian prayer is Vocal Prayer. We recite words that others composed. It is by definition a wordy prayer. We don’t usually sit silently for very long during vocal prayer. Still, at its best it can be a stepping stone to contemplation.

2. The next stage of prayer is Discursive Meditation. We read a passage from a devotional book, ideally Sacred Scripture, and we ponder its meaning briefly. The goal is not to become theologians, making prayer into study, but to let our reflections lead us to speak to God from the heart. Here we might have a little less talking, and more “listening” to God’s voice in the text and our reflections on it. But our mind and our will are actively engaged. Discursive meditation leads us to affective prayer.

3. Affective Prayer is a simpler meditation. Instead of taking ten minutes to read and ponder a Scripture passage, we might spend a minute or two picturing Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (a favorite subject of St. Teresa’s). Our will is moved to express its love for God almost at once. In affective prayer, we are sometimes moved to sit silently for a moment (or longer) to hear what the Holy Spirit would say to us. When our mind begins to wander, we return to our image or take up another and repeat the process.

4. The last stage of prayer that we can reach without special divine intervention is called by many different names. Teresa calls it Acquired Recollection. Here we begin to gaze at Jesus with love, saying a few words now and then, but mostly soaking in His presence. We might, on the other hand, have to return to discursive meditation or even vocal prayer at times.

5. In this passage, she is actually talking about Infused Recollection, the first stage of Infused Contemplation (also called Supernatural Contemplation). But the instruction on when to remain silent, waiting for God to speak, and when to make acts of the will, applies to earlier stages of prayer as well. We follow the prompting of God and the movement of our hearts.

Recollection often alternates between something the soul produces through grace, and the pure act of God. It is difficult to distinguish between the two at first.

6. Then God begins to take over our prayer time more and more. He brings us to the Prayer of Quiet. Here, the will becomes God’s captive, but the mind sometimes races around wildly, not knowing what to do with itself.

7, 8, 9. If we continue on the path of prayer and virtue (one cannot grow without the other, in Teresa’s teaching), we will eventually be brought to the Prayer of Union - Simple, Conforming, and Transforming. Here, God suspends the operations of both the intellect and the will. Total absorption in God casts out all distraction. We expend no effort at all. God does everything.

Many Christians who seek out personal prayer and meditation find themselves led to Eastern, non-Christian meditation approaches, New Age mindfulness meditation, and Centering Prayer.

Practiced by many throughout the world, these forms of prayer and meditation, as proposed by Rossini, may not be viewed as authentic CATHOLIC PRAYER for their intent is to empty the mind.

The purpose of Catholic prayer is to be in relationship with God, initially filling the mind with scripture, images, and thoughts of God, to open hearts and receive His Love, and to surrender to God's Will. Rossini includes Centering Prayer made popular by the American Catholic priest, Fr. Thomas Keating, as not authentic Catholic Prayer, but I disagree. For me, it is an initial step towards abiding in the Presence of God.

Radical Love classes and practice groups intend to present authentic Catholic teachings and practices on the inner life. However, it acknowledges that the non-Christian, Eastern teachings and practices on God Consciousness may be a reflection of the Christian Prayer of Union at grades 7, 8, and 9 in Teresa's 9 grades of Catholic Prayer.

"Forcing the intellect to be still is completely foreign to Teresa’s teaching. We try by gentle means to overcome distractions. We fix our mind and heart on Christ and speak to Him in love, sometimes in words, other times with a look of love.

Silence is not the goal of prayer. It is a means to invite God in. He will come when He wills. We must be content to wait for Him".

Connie Rossinni

I use “prayer” as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself.

Fr. Richard Rohr

'The Naked Now'