Communal Prayers, Personal Prayers or Both?
In two previous articles, we sought to identify the differences between personal prayers and communal prayers. For personal prayer, we highlighted that it is an intimate and loving one-on-one with Jesus where we are nourished for our journey ahead. For communal prayer, we noted that it builds us up into a people of God. Now, we will wrap up this short series highlighting how both types of prayer compliment each other.
How personal prayer strengthens communal prayers
Have you ever prayed in the presence of a especially holy and devout person? If you’ve have, chances are you felt a deep fire within yourself as though your faith was being reawakened in a new, profound way. A holy and devout man or woman of God intensifies a community’s prayer.
I had this experience with praying the rosary with a seminarian on a regular basis. Maybe it was the way he reverently recited the mediation or the particular faithful intensity by which he carried it out, but nevertheless, I was moved to fall in love with the rosary for the first time in my life. Only later did I realise that he prayed the rosary every day before heading to bed.
Yet He frequently withdrew to the wilderness to pray.
- Luke 5:16
When we pray in the silence with our Father, we intensify our relationship with him and it shows in prayer with others. Our faith is always personal but never private, our faith can always spark the faith of others. Thus, when we head into community having been already nourished by God in private, we bring that same fire into other people’s lives.
Furthermore, your personal prayer and mediations help to immerse yourself in communal prayers more. For most Catholics, the mass is boring. I too thought the exact same thing. However, when I started to pray more in front of the blessed sacrament, I started to enjoy the mass more. Somehow, when adoring the Eucharist, I began to crave it more and more.
Sherry Wendell observed many similar things at Christ the King Parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan — a parish that nurtures parishioners’ personal relationship with Jesus:
He described the Mass at CTK as “absolutely alive, reverent, and expectant, a shared experience of God”… I had already been moved by the atmosphere at the two Masses I attended. It wasn’t that the elements of the Mass were different, although they were well and carefully celebrated. It was something else. I could feel a spiritual energy that I have hardly every experienced before at Mass, as though the intensity of the prayer of those gathered lifted my own prayer to a new level. I mentioned this to several parishioners, and they told me that what I had experienced was normal.
How communal prayer strengthens personal prayers
When we start praying not only as a community but also as individuals, we also start to notice that our community prayer, instead of being rote and boring compared to our private prayers, actually start to make a difference in our own spiritual walk with Jesus.
We are forgetful creatures. As Brett McKay points out in his blog the Art of Manliness, becoming the man you want to be is not like riding a bike. When you ride a bike, you only need to learn how to do it once and you’re done. However, when it comes to the spiritual life, there are so many distractions in life that we can easily forget who God made us to be.
We constantly need cues to trigger our memory about what we have to do and who we are — a holy people of God. We need reminders to move our memories of God’s goodness from the back of our minds to the front of it.
I experienced an example of this recently. During a homily, a priest shared with the congregation about his time in Europe. In contrast with things at home, he did not have to celebrate a daily mass. And without this daily reminder, he said he easily forgot his identity as a priest when he was overseas!
When we allow our friends and family to keep us accountable for our race of faith, we find that it becomes a lot easier. Reminders help us to intensify your relationship with Jesus. Every mass I head to I am challenged to always surrender more and more to Jesus and to intensify my relationship with him.
“Private prayer is like straw scattered here and there: If you set it on fire it makes a lot of little flames. But gather these straws into a bundle and light them, and you get a mighty fire, rising like a column into the sky; public prayer is like that.”
— Saint John Vianney
Conclusion
In the interaction between personal and communal prayers, we have to realise that both are ultimately necessary. While personal prayers allow us to enter into our own unique relationship with our Blessed Lord, communal prayer are equally important as they remind us that our relationship is that of devotion and not simple emotion. In this virtuous cycle, I pray that you may be continually and progressively sanctified before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
