Having a Full Prayer Life: From Vocal Prayers to Meditation and Contemplation

“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.”

- Karl Rahner

“Our witness, however, would be hopelessly inadequate if we ourselves had not first contemplated his face.”

- St. John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte

A few months back, I was talking with a friend who was struggling with an issue. Curiously, I asked him if he was praying about this issue and he replied, “oh yes, yes! I’ve been praying about this!” Usually I would have stopped asking any more questions, but this time, I decided to take it one step further… “So, umm, how have you been praying?” “Oh, I’ve been doing lauds in the morning and praying 5 minutes before I go to bed.” “WHAT! THAT’S NOT PRAYER!” I shouted (I can’t remember if I did this in real life or in my mind).

I shocked myself with this instinctual response. Upon reflection, I realised it came from an ongoing question that I’ve been trying to answer, mainly: What does it take to have a truly transformative prayer life?

On one hand, being overly rigid with prayer advice can reduce Christianity to a program. I would love to tell everyone that all you need to do to grow in your relationship with Christ is to follow my own prayer schedule or one of the saints. But wouldn’t this just smack of a mentality that Christianity is just following a bunch of rules and obligations? And doesn’t it sound like one just has to follow some steps to get a certain result? Just do this… and you will be holy. Discipleship is not a checklist. Furthermore, even within my own life, I know that my prayer habits have varied from season to season. Surely there cannot be an “ideal prayer life” that applies equally to everyone.

On the other hand, surely an “anything goes” mentality will just lead to mediocrity. Ask any Catholic, “how is your prayer life?” Would they respond with words like “intimate”, “transformative” or “life-changing”? Why do the pews during mass look dead? Why is the Church far from being one that is missionary and evangelistic? Why are hordes of young people leaving the faith? One of the reasons has to be that the prayer life of the average Catholic is not nearly deep or transformative enough! We have surface-level interior lives! We do not really have prayer lives that allow us to catch fire with God’s divine love. So comes the question: what does it take to have a deep prayer life? The answer has to straddle the line between rigidity and mediocrity.

Curious to satisfy my question, I searched the pages of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and found a potential answer in CCC2699: “The Lord leads all persons by paths and in ways pleasing to him, and each believer responds according to his heart’s resolve and the personal expressions of his prayer. However, Christian Tradition has retained three major expressions of prayer: vocal, meditative, and contemplative.” Let me explain what each of them entails…

Vocal Prayer

Vocal prayer, as the name implies, is the external raising of one’s voice in prayer to God. Think of the liturgy of the hours, the call-and-response that we engage in at the mass or even the rosary recited out loud. Since we are body and spirit, we need to engage all our senses in the right praise of God, hence making vocal prayer a staple of the Catholic life. This form of prayer is also the most accessible to groups of people.

Meditation

From one side, meditation is the pondering over the mysteries of Jesus Christ as in lectio divina or the rosary (if one meditates on the 5 mysteries instead of just reciting words). One can meditate on the Gospels, holy icons, writings of spiritual fathers, spiritual books, etc. Meditation is not merely reading or skimming. This is not merely someone reading a list of recipe instructions and saying “oh, got it”. Rather, it is more like someone taking 20 minutes out of his busy day to enter into a concentrated time of reading the daily Gospel, slowly mulling over the words and allowing them to wash over him and enter more deeply into his mind and heart. This is a slow and prayerful pondering. Going beyond surface-level vocal prayers, meditation allows us to penetrate and enter more deeply into the mystery of God. In meditation, we engage “thought, imagination, emotion, and desire” (CCC2723) and are engulfed and enfolded in the mystery of God.

However, that’s only the first side of meditation. From the other side, we come to the Lord, naked and honest, with our aches, longing, sufferings, hopes, joys, fears, loves and life and pour our hearts out unto him. We say to Jesus, “Lord, I am tired”, “I am lonely”, “I am afraid”. “We discover in meditation the movements that stir the heart and we are able to discern them” (CCC2706). We grow in self-awareness. Imagine someone journalling their day and inviting Jesus to speak into their situation or someone doing a nightly examen.

Putting both aspects together, we see that in meditation, we enter into a two-way conversation between us and Jesus Christ. We open the “book of life” with all our problems and troubles, hopes and joys and then we open the “book of faith” where Christ speaks to us through pondering the scriptures.

“Prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture, so that a dialogue takes place between God and man. For ‘we speak to him when we pray; we listen to him when we read the divine oracles.’” (CCC2653)

By opening the “book of faith” and the “book of life”, we internalise what we are reading. The impressions, images and words do not merely remain intellectual abstractions or moral obligations far removed from the reality of life. Rather, they transform the individual — they change his life. The way he sees, the way he thinks and the way he acts. Through meditation, we realise that Christianity is not about sociologically peer-pressing people to conform, rather it is about the internal transformation of our very desires and loves. Christianity is not about reading a set of lofty rules or ethical commitments and then applying it to our world, it is a wholesale conversion of the way we even see the world. Meditation will “deepen our convictions of faith, prompt the conversion of our heart, and strengthen our will to follow Christ” (CCC2708).

If all this sounds really abstract, an example might help: Imagine someone who wanted to learn more about the life of Joseph of the Old Testament. He wants to meditate on one chapter a day and sets aside around 30 minutes or so daily. During that time, he slowly reads the texts from Genesis, taking time to highlight important words or verses and journals what impressions he receives from his reading. He grapples with this figure, this man. His mind ponders over the various events that transpired in Joseph’s life. His various virtues — the forgiveness of his brothers, his lack of resentment whatsoever towards those who had wronged him and his heroic competence. At the same time, he journals down his own life experiences and questions and allows God to mould him through the meditations. Would the his perception not change? Would his desires to become a kind of man like Joseph not transform after the course of a month?

“Christians owe it to themselves to develop the desire to meditate regularly, lest they come to resemble the three first kinds of soil in the parable of the sower.” (CCC2707)

As a caveat, however, we must remember that even as meditation will increase our understanding of God, “a method is only a guide; the important thing is to advance, with the Holy Spirit, along the one way of prayer: Christ Jesus” (CCC2707). In other words, to paraphrase a good priest, when we meditate, we do not possess the mystery of God, instead the mystery possesses us. Meditation should not result in us becoming proud due to our increased perception or insight, it should ultimately lead us to Jesus.

Contemplation

“What is contemplative prayer? St. Teresa answers: “Contemplative prayer in my opinion is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.” Contemplative prayer seeks him “whom my soul loves.” It is Jesus, and in him, the Father… In this inner prayer… our attention is fixed on the Lord himself.” (CCC2709)

When we talk about contemplative prayer, think this: union with Jesus. Contemplative prayer is the simple expression of prayer. It goes beyond the speech of vocal prayer and the mysteries of meditation: contemplation is about a communing with a person — this JESUS — totally, exclusively and directly. Contemplation is silence. It is analogous to when two lovers stare into each other’s eyes in silence after a long conversation has ended. If the rancorous conversation that they had is like meditation, then the silence and gaze after is like contemplation. The silence between them is not uncomfortable but is actually a deep form of unitive love. Similarly, the purest expression of contemplative prayer is, I think, eucharistic adoration, where one simply gazes into the loving eyes of our blessed Lord and saviour.

“Contemplation is a gaze of faith, fixed on Jesus. “I look at him and he looks at me”” (CCC2715)

How do we practice this contemplative prayer? The Cloud of Unknowing recommends: “This is what you are to do. Lift your heart up to the Lord with a gentle stirring of love, desiring him for his own sake and not for his gifts”. We make an act of the will to love God. Going beyond images, impressions, words, thoughts, this is the realm of loving God because he is worthy of love.

Like meditative prayer, contemplative prayer changes us. By contemplating the Lord in eucharistic adoration, we learn more and more to see Jesus in the world. Our perception changes. By staying around him for so long, we learn and know what true love is and seek to pour that out into the world. Our loves and desires change. By being next to Christ, we take on his properties. We become more like God.

“His gaze purifies our heart; the light of the countenance of Jesus illumines the eyes of our heart and teaches us to see everything in the light of his truth and his compassion for all men. Contemplation also turns its gaze on the mysteries of the life of Christ. Thus it learns the “interior knowledge of our Lord,” the more to love him and follow him.” (CCC2715)

Towards the Fullness of Catholic Prayer

“He who neglects mental prayer [meditation and contemplation], needs no devil to carry him to hell. He brings himself there with his own hands.”

- St. Teresa of Avila

Now, we go back to the question at hand: what does it take to have a truly transformative prayer life? My answer dovetails St. Teresa of Avila’s statement — truly transformative prayer is not just vocal prayer, but also meditative and contemplative prayer. We need all three. My hypothesis is that the vast majority of Catholics have been stuck on rote vocal prayers for most of their life. That’s why they aren’t being evangelised. To have a deep interior life, we need to go beyond rote prayers, we have to enter deeper into the mystery of God through meditative and contemplative prayer!

However, as I say all of this, I am not demeaning vocal prayer. In fact, when we begin to include meditation and contemplation, we will also find something interesting! That our vocal prayer becomes more meditative and contemplative. We will find ourselves during mass reflecting on certain words of the liturgy that move us, that jump out at us. We will find ourselves craving the Eucharist after consecration. Our experience of the mass will be totally renewed! Indeed, “vocal prayer becomes an initial form of contemplative prayer” (CCC2704). Vocal prayer will go from “saying words” to spontaneously welling up from the bottom of our hearts.

Indeed, when we have all three forms of prayer, they end up mutually reinforcing each other like three foundation pillars. The words during mass will follow us into our meditations as we reflect on them… As we tease out why our hearts were moved by those words in front of the blessed sacrament, we slowly drift into silence before our Lord in union with him… and the intimacy experienced will flow into the compline that we attend later that night…

A Modest Proposal: 20 Minutes

My challenge to all Catholics is this: in your standard week, is there an allocated time for all three expressions of prayer? Not just vocal, but meditative and contemplative as well… Make time! The Lord is waiting for you…

If you are looking for a practical solution, I will propose what Archbishop Fulton Sheen gave to most laity he met: 20 minutes with the daily Gospel in silence. No distractions. Just meditating on the scripture. Or contemplating our Lord. What would happen if we did this? In a few months, we would be totally aflame with the love of God…