How does one pray?

You can bend on your knees, close your eyes, put your palms together, point them up, and say, “Our Father.”

Or you can pound your fists against the wall and scream. It happens.

I got the feeling that I was supposed to know how to pray, after being Catholic all my life and going to Catholic schools, but when I decided to really look into it, on my own, for my own use, I didn’t know how to pray.

Jesus’ Apostles asked Him to teach them to pray as John The Baptist had taught his disciples. “When you pray,” Jesus answered, “pray like this.” He wasn’t telling them everything about how He prayed, nor was he conducting the entire class on prayer. I think rather He spontaneously suggested an approach and some topics that were useful examples, even indulging their foibles so far as to give them permission to ask God to please not lead them into temptation. (As if in the Garden of Eden God had said to Adam and Eve, “This is my friend, the Serpent. He’ll give you good advice!” and then stepped away to watch that fateful encounter.) The Lord’s Prayer is one of the great comfort prayers, but a slavish devotion to that is akin to the person who goes into a forest and copies the drawing of someone else in the forest who just drew a tree.

An authentic prayer arising from an inspired individual is more in the spirit of the Lord’s Prayer than a rote recitation of that prayer itself.

A more comprehensive discussion of prayer was planned for this article, but one should only say so much at a time. Maybe next time I’ll write about what I thought I was going to write about this time!   

Death will certainly not be the end of all the things of personal life. So what will one leave behind?
The fewer the things one can pass along, the fewer the things the survivors will have to fight over. If any such combative people populate one’s circle, that could be a factor to consider. One can leave everything to the spouse, but that’s too much to ask of a spouse, and that shouldn’t be the job of the spouse. If the sons want cars and the daughters want furniture, the spouse in question should decide beforehand which son gets which car and which daughter gets which sofa. If there’s stuff that’ll be more trouble than it’s worth, have a garage sale or something! This will work, provided one lives with integrity and has the necessary conversations with the concerned persons to arrive at prudent, considerate, transparent decisions that will not be misunderstood in life or contested afterward.
The regular churchgoer should delight in contemplating which scriptures should be read during one’s service. One quickly turns to favorite, well-known passages. Hearing one’s favorite scriptures at Mass is a treat, and one can look forward to imagining the mourners at one’s funeral hearing God question Job, “Have you seen the janitors of Shadowland?” “No, but maybe our friend in the casket is seeing them right now!” will think one’s mourners with a shiver and a keen sense of thrill. Can one arrange for the Gospel to consist of passages from different Gospels, leaping from Matthew, to John, to Revelation? Perhaps one could explain beforehand to his priest exactly what he wants done so that, if misgivings threaten, the persuasive powers of one’s convictions can prevail. Are there favorite songs of the spouse, or another close one? That could be the best way of honoring that special someone.
The funeral Mass might be too late to attempt to desperately redefine one’s life and one’s relationship with God. It’s simply a routine religious service performed as a powerful act of closure upon a life, but it is not the only or even final such act of closure. The reception after a funeral is an excellent opportunity to present one’s vision of life. A slide show can display photos and texts, any visual aids. A Catholic funeral would not be the place for a reading from the Upanishads, or a short story by Kafka, but a reception slide show could include dozens of literary excerpts one lived by in life. If music is played, and if music was central to that life, one might not need look any further than one’s own smartphone to create a playlist he’d choose to have played at his reception. Those will be suffering songs, angry songs, desperate songs, cacaphonous songs, love songs, revolution songs, old songs, new songs, forgotten songs, instrumental songs, sublime, exquisite, magnificent songs people will be glad to hear, knowing the person had the decency not to try to represent himself at his reception as someone he was not. That playlist should be such an emotional joy and reward that one listens to it every year on one’s birthday, keeping it current, adding and subtracting, keeping it perfect. A good death is a good work in life, an opportunity one can constructively embrace.

One hears stories from soldiers about combat, about how keeping their buddies and themselves alive are their strongest motivations. They don’t want to let their friends down. It’s not going off to war and personally representing the foreign policy of a politician, although nowadays, and in past times, plenty of combatants are inspired by ideologies and agendas.

A Catholic struggles through life as a player in the cosmic drama of light and dark, in a dimension beyond the mundane, quotidian concerns of diet, fashion, and Facebook. Our daily lives contain the spice of eschatology, so that the stakes are great that are in play as the sum of our actions and the influence we wield through the details of our lives.

The consequences being definitively enormous, we seek support wherever we can find it. We memorize inspirational quotes, formulate mantras, wrestle with counterproductive habits and distractions.

We have patron saints. I share the names of Joseph and Matthew, so as a husband and father, I have the example and patronage of Joseph. When Pope Francis cited Joseph’s “concrete, humble, and lowly service,” I took that as an affirmation of the value of doing the seemingly unimportant things that chafe because one wants more important things to do, and wants others to not think one doesn’t have more important things he can do, should do, and does do. As a “late bloomer,” I can look to Matthew as someone else who wasn’t his best self until someone came along and called him to it.

Every day has its many saints, some well-known, others known only as a name on a list. The day you were born has its saints, and those saints are the patron saints of everyone born on that day. St. Francis de Sales is the patron saint of journalists, so he is the patron saint of we, the “ink-stained wretches” of the written word.

Saints become patrons of their homes. Seattle has Mother Cabrini, patroness saint of Seattle. The saints of Ireland are the patrons of the Irish.

After I read the Confessions of St. Augustine, I adopted him as a patron saint, and did the same with St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Bernadette, St. John of the Cross, and St. Francis of Assisi. My wife took the name of Scholastica as her Confirmation name, and my son George Martyn brings St. George and St. Martin (spelling difference disregarded!) into our group of family patrons. St. Louise is among our patrons, because the grade school I attended is named in her honor. As a family of musicians, St. Cecilia is another of our patrons. George has a stuffed lion we named “King Wenceslaus,” so St. Wenceslaus too is among our family patrons.

As life unfolds toward its end, these patron saints are specific reminders of the community of souls who support us with their prayers. I hope they will invite us into Heaven, and if it comes down to it, their invitation will be our ticket to that party!