Sense and Nonsense: On Fixed Prayer and the Freeing of Devotion

In her short story, “The Deluge at Norderney,” Isak Dinesen told of a Cardinal Hamilcar von Sehestedt, who was an anomaly in those Protestant lands of Schleswig-Holstein. “The one remarkable thing about (the Cardinal’s) family,” we are amusingly told, was what they had stuck, through many trials, to the ancient Roman Catholic faith of the land. They had no mobility of spirit to change what they had once gotten into their heads. The Cardinal had nine brothers and sisters, none of whom had shown any evidence of a spiritual life. But this is what we wonder about, isn’t it, — what are the “evidences of a spiritual life”?

I was thinking of this the other day after I had gone to a parish, where, as far as I could tell, the celebrant (not me) made up all three collect prayers of the Mass instead of following the ones in the Missal. At least he did not make up the Canon, though I have seen this happen too. I found myself distractedly wondering whether what the celebrant said was accurate, was according to the way the Church prays at Mass?

One of the signs of “a spiritual life,” I think, is the presence of prayers and rituals from childhood, from the generations. I realize that many today simply have received nothing of prayers from childhood, so they have much to learn on beginning. The father of a friend of mine recently died. On the back of the memento card of his death was the “Memorare.” This was the lovely prayer that my grand-mother in Iowa taught us to say after the rosary.

Spontaneous prayer, to be sure, has become a sort of “in” thing; and, as the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, among others like the Pentecostal groups, have taught us, this is a good thing in its proper place. Nevertheless, our prayers should conform to what is specifically taught in the Church, which has taken thousands of years, often, better to clarify them for us.

Something may be said also for fifty different versions of the “Our Father” in English or French. But somehow it seems that at our most profound moments, it is not only comforting but necessary that we pray, old and young and in-between, pray aloud with the very same words. Nothing is more touching for a priest, I suppose, than to listen to one of his little grandnieces or a child of one of his friends recite for the first time, in company, haltingly, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

“This advantage of a fixed form of service,” C. S. Lewis wrote to a lady on April 1, 1952,

is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it — it might be phony or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible.

In a fixed form, we ought to have “gone through the motions” before in our private prayer; the rigid form really sets our devotion free. I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the preoccupation of the moment (i.e., war, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the ex tempore method can help becoming provincial, and I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God.

I have always had a real concern about this latter, as have classical spiritual writers. Nothing should more frighten a priest than the thought that people are coming to Mass simply because he is saying it or preaching at it. Christianity, of course, is a religion that speaks through men, but it has always suspected that holiness and eloquence, or grace and personality, are not simply coterminous. Neither eloquence nor a pleasing personality ought to be downplayed. They too are gifts, but what is said or repeated ought not to be things that a talented Christian clergyman or layman simply makes up and “shares” — awful word — with whoever happens to be standing by. The ex tempore, in my experience, valuable as it can be, is almost always more nar¬row and less freeing than the precise, “rigid,” accurate forms of prayer that embody the simplicity, eloquence, and authority of the ages of the Church.

Our prayers and creeds and formulae of address to the Lord God should be, in large part, then, classical, things everyone has memorized and repeated with long habit. We should recite and sing creeds and rosaries and teach our children from the very beginning to do so. We should be able to recite the “Our Father,” the “Hail Mary,” the “Memorare,” Acts of Faith and Contrition, and “Apostles’ Creeds” even before we know about what they mean, so that when we finally do understand what they mean, we will know them, and how to say them.

On February 16, 1826, Eckermann spoke with Goethe about a “curious” poem of his which had appeared in Frankfurt in 1776. Eckermann said, “It is without doubt the oldest of all the known poems of Goethe. Its subject was Christ’s descent into Hell, and I found it striking that the religious way of seeing things had been so familiar to the young scholar.” But when we think of this, what is more natural than to suppose that Goethe had learned the Creeds by heart in his early youth?

Something may be said, no doubt, for finger painting in catechism class or Sunday school, in order to find out what “original” thing little tykes might have dreamed up. But what I suspect will serve a child or adolescent more are those age-old prayers, devotions, and creeds that have come to us from anon and which teach us the “permanent shape of Christianity” before we even realize it. It is to these that we and others can return when we want to pray together in those ultimate moments in our public and private lives in this world wherein life and death and destiny confront us.

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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