Personal Prayer
The Church is open daily from 7:00 am to 12:30 noon, and again from 3:00 pm to 8:00 pm, unless for reasons concerning the current pandemic situation where at times due to covid regulations the times where the Church was open before had to be restricted to prevent the possibilities of the disease being spread. The Church is open for personal prayer and private adoration before the blessed sacrament in the Tabernacle. The Angelus bell is rung three times a day; the first at 5:30 am the second at 12:00 noon and the third at 6:30 pm, for the recitation of the Rosary and Marian devotion. You are most welcome to pray personally or as a family in the Church during the aforementioned hours. Due to covid restrictions group prayers should be carried out with extreme caution and are at the moment suspended until further notice.
The Power of Personal Prayer
There is certainly great power in public prayer, especially the Mass and the Sacraments, by which Christ makes His divine life available to us in a pre-eminent way. Christ also taught that wherever two or three are gathered together in His name, He will be in their midst (Mt 18:20). But the power of Christ’s presence, offered to us in all the various forms of public prayer, cannot be absorbed and released into our own lives without personal prayer. For a deep combination of spiritual and psychological reasons, if we fail to pray personally, we not only miss many opportunities to do good, but we slowly smother our own relationship with Christ—no matter how many times we go through the motions of public or group prayer.
Although liturgical prayer can and should be intensely personal, we cannot learn to pray personally, or ever excel at it, unless we are willing to pray privately. Our Lord tells us this point blank when he warns us not to be hypocrites, who pray only in public, but to go to our rooms, close our doors and pray privately to our Father, who reads the secrets of our hearts (Mt 6). In fact, the New Testament speaks repeatedly about private prayer (and says comparatively little about any other kind). Jesus prayed at his baptism (Lk 3:21), He frequently went aside to pray alone (see Mt 14, Mk 1 & 6, Lk 5 & 6, etc.), He prayed at the time of his Transfiguration (Lk 9), He prayed that Peter would not fail in his faith (Lk 22), and He prayed mightily during his Passion (Mt 26, Mk 14). Even his great priestly prayer at the Last Supper (for all those the Father had given Him in the world) was an intensely personal prayer said in the presence of the Twelve (Jn 17).
Not surprisingly for one who prayed so frequently, Our Lord also taught often about personal and private prayer. He enjoined us to pray for our enemies and those who persecute, curse and calumniate us (Mt 5, Lk 6); He told us to pray for vocations (Mt 9, Lk 10); He urged us to pray against the temptations and trials of the end times (Mt 24, Mk 13); and He warned us to pray unceasingly (Mk 13, Lk 18, Lk 21). He also explained that we would receive whatever we asked in prayer (Mt 21, Mk 11), and He taught us the Our Father so we would know both how to pray and what kinds of things to pray for (Mt 6, Lk 11). The evidence abounds in the gospels, and this emphasis on personal prayer continues in both the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles.
Persistence in Prayer
In the many New Testament texts on prayer, we see Our Lord emphasizing again and again the need to pray persistently, without losing heart. He told two wonderful stories about the importance of persistence, one concerning a widow and an unjust judge (Lk 18), and the other about a man who needed to borrow bread from his neighbor in the middle of the night (Lk 11). Both the judge and the neighbor, neither of whom loved as God loves, succumbed to the onslaught of personal entreaty. Moreover, Jesus sometimes demanded that same persistence from others, as in the case of the Canaanite woman who actually had to argue with the Son of God that even dogs get the crumbs from under their master’s table (Mt 15, Mk 7). The result was that He healed her daughter.
After the story of the importunate neighbor, Our Lord so stressed persistence in prayer that it became a proverb: “I tell you, ask and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (Lk 11:9-10). But his next point is even more dramatic. What father, Jesus asks, will give his son a serpent when he asks for a fish, or a scorpion when he asks for an egg? This question is the prelude to Our Lord’s final and greatest lesson about prayer: If we who are evil know how to give good gifts to our children, “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Lk 11:13)
The Holy Spirit in Prayer
Here Our Lord teaches us that the Holy Spirit is always at work in prayer. The magnitude of Christ’s teaching is precisely this: Personal prayer is a continuous motion of the Holy Spirit between the one who prays and the Father (or, indeed, the Son). It is the Holy Spirit whom the Father continually gives in prayer, and the Holy Spirit whom the Father continually receives back. (Rm 8:22-27)
The challenge for us is that this astonishing and growing action of the Holy Spirit—this ever-deepening exchange of the Holy Spirit between ourselves and the Father—does not take place within us unless we pray personally, by which I really mean interiorly. There is nothing automatic about it, and the mere external use of rites, group prayers, or verbal formulas avails nothing. True prayer requires our personal, interior participation—that is, our determination to communicate with the Father, honestly lifting ourselves to God with whatever capacity we possess at the time. Even if all we can do is throw ourselves toward God in an occasional moment of fear or longing, we have made a beginning according to our capacity. The intention and the habit of personal prayer can be built on whatever beginning is within our power. It is up to us to practice, to exercise this initially limited ability to pray.
