Looking for an active spiritual life? Try memorizing prayers

Learning the prayers by heart is making sure they are there when you need God most.

I could hardly believe it when I found myself reciting the Ave Maria while I was quickly taken to the operating room for an emergency caesarean section last January. While the predominant emotions of the last moments that led to my daughter's birth were fear ("Will my baby be okay?") And disappointment ("This isn't going as I hoped."), I also remember the surprise that this a particular prayer emerged in my consciousness. Years before I had prayed to Mary before the surgery. Although I am not against Marian devotion, it is not my personal spiritual style more than Doc Martens is my first choice of footwear. The moment I became a mother, however, praying to Maria seemed right and, although it surprised me, it comforted me.

Thanks to having memorized the Ave Maria, praying to Mary came naturally in my time of need, despite my ordinary distance from her. I am one of the millions of Catholics for whom Marian devotion is not an ordinary aspect of their spiritual life and yet is capable of reciting an Hail Mary in a hat. Whether thanks to the Catholic school, religious education based on the Baltimore catechism or the family's night prayers, this basis of Catholic prayer life is rooted in our minds as the promise of faithfulness.

The practice of learning and reciting prayers written by others has a long history. From an early age Jesus would have learned prayers from memory recited in the synagogue. One of the fundamental prayers of our faith - the Lord's prayer - came from Jesus himself. St. Paul exalted the first Christians to keep faith with the teachings passed on to them, which presumably would include the prayer that Jesus taught us, and many church fathers testified to the common use of prayers such as the sign of the cross and the Lord's Prayer . Around 200 CE Tertullian wrote: “In all our travels and movements, in all our entrances and exits, in putting our shoes, in the bathroom, at the table, in lighting our candles, lying down, sitting down, whatever occupation occupy us, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross "and at the beginning of the fifth century, SS.

Today the church continues to pass on these basic prayers (and those developed later, such as the Hail Mary and the Act of Contrition), teaching that memorizing prayers is an essential support for an active spiritual life. However, following the broader trends of U.S. education, the practice of memorizing in religious education has fallen out of pedagogical favor.

In my job as director of faith formation, I teach my parish confirmation program and many of my students admit they don't know the basic prayers of our tradition. To tell the truth, they learned and knew prayers at some point. The devout second grade catechist of our parish of over a dozen years gives each of her young students a "I know my prayers" card and, when they receive their first Eucharist, they all recited with pride and received stickers for prayer of the Lord, Gloria and Ave Maria. But for many of our students their enrollment in our faith training program is their only connection to the church, and without reinforcement at home or during mass prayers slip through their memories as the capital of Bangladesh did from my years ago.

From time to time I wondered if I should train catechists to put more emphasis on memorizing prayers during their weekly faith-forming lessons in order to root words more deeply into our students' minds. At the same time, I also wondered if part of each class should be devoted to completing a service project, reading the Sunday gospel, or exploring different types of prayer. The fact is that there is only so much time in a year of the religious education program (23 hours in ours, to be exact; our program is quite typical in that it runs from late September to early May and you don't meets during holidays or school holidays weekends). Every moment dedicated to a worthy learning objective is time taken by another, and I happen to believe that knowing the parables of Jesus,

Apart from the fact that time in the classroom is scarce while important materials abound, I have never been sure that the promotion of memorizing prayers conveys the message I want to send. If Sunday morning lessons are the only place where many of our students are exposed to the conversation about faith and God, we need to be very careful what we tell them about faith and God. If nothing else, I want our children to know that God loves them in any case, that they are precious human beings in anything and that their faith will be there for them in any case. I don't think memorizing prayers contributes to this knowledge.

Or rather, I didn't think it was like that until I had my crisis in the labor and delivery room. At that moment I realized that memorizing prayers does more than I tend to credit him. Having the Ave Maria memorized meant that I didn't have to think about how to pray or what to pray; the prayer came to my mind naturally as the breath.

In a too stimulating and frightening moment, this was a real gift. As I prayed for memorized words, words that, frankly, don't mean much to me most of the time, I felt peace - an experience of God's love - washing me. In other words, having a memorized prayer made my faith and my God accessible to me in a time of need.

I recently read a story about the training methods of Anson Dorrance, the University of North Carolina female soccer coach and a man with one of the most successful coach records in the history of athletics. In addition to all the planned strategies - conditioning, stretching, exercises - Dorrance requires its players to memorize three different literary quotes each year, each choice chosen because it communicates one of the fundamental values ​​of the team. Dorrance realizes that in challenging moments on the pitch, his players' minds will go somewhere, and is paving the way for them to go to positive places by filling them with quotes that communicate courage, strength, possibility and courage. Where the minds of the players go, they follow their actions.

What we have memorized constitutes a soundtrack for our lives; just as music has the power to influence our mood and energy, so does this mental soundtrack. We can't necessarily choose when the music hits or which song plays at a particular time, but we can control, at least to some extent, what we burn on the soundtrack in the first place.

For many of us, the contents of our soundtrack were determined by our parents, teachers, siblings or television habits during our early years of life. Every time my brothers and I fought all our childhood, my mother drove us crazy by singing the prayer of Saint Francis. Now, when I am about to return a passive and aggressive comment with a quick and I am able to restrain myself because the words "make me a channel of your peace" pass through my head, I am grateful. On a less noble note, most trips to the library trigger the slightly irritating song "having fun is not difficult when you have a library card" from the show PBS Arthur.

That our soundtracks are full of the aphorisms of our parents, of the poems that we memorized during the seventh grade English lessons, shampoo advertising jingles or Latin declinations, the good news is that they are not set in stone. They are constantly being rewritten and we can control what happens to them by intentionally choosing to memorize particular poems, scripture verses, passages of books or prayers; adding a track is as simple as repeating the words we want to memorize again and again. The extra benefit of memorizing is that reciting repeated words has been shown to slow down breathing, thereby inducing calm and improving concentration. Memory, after all, is like a muscle; the more you use it, the more you reinforce it.

There is no shortage of prayer practices within the Catholic Church and I am grateful to be part of a tradition that offers various methods of connecting with God. Recognizing that our preferences and desires are given by God as our talents and abilities, not I think there is something wrong with gravitating towards certain practices. At the same time, I am also grateful for the life experiences that push me to remain open to new ways of knowing God and deepening my faith. My experience during the birth of my daughter was one of those experiences, as it led me to feel Maria's calming touch and helped me see the value of memorizing.

Memorizing prayers is like putting money into a retirement account: it is easy to forget that the account exists because it is inaccessible for the foreseeable future, but then it is there for you when you need it most. Now I see that it's worth spending some time investing in this account and helping others to do it too.