Letting Prayer Lead from Self to Other

Letting Prayer Lead from Self to Other May 26, 2015

Tonight I’m speaking in NYC at First Things at 6p.  I hope to see some of you there or next week when I do a Theology on Tap in Boston on June 2nd.

cry woof

As part of the Patheos Book Club, I got to do a Q&A with Will Duquette about Arriving at Amen.  Will’s a great guy, a third order Dominican and the kind of person who titles his blog “Cry Woof! And let slip the dogs of whimsy…”

Here are a few excerpts from our conversation:

 Cry Woof: Your use of the examen started out narrow and eventually broadened: from looking just at what you actually did, you began to look outward at the network of people around you and began to consider what you might have done.  (As Sun Microsystems used to say, the Network is the Computer.)  Are there other areas of your life where prayer has led you from a focus on yourself to a focus on others?

Leah: I think all prayer has involved this self-to-other movement for me, but particularly petitionary prayer.  I had thought of it, prior to conversion, as just asking for life to be easier for me.  So, if I was praying for someone else, it would be in the context of “Make this person different so that they annoy me less.”  In practice, when I pray for someone else, I don’t wind up asking for parts of them to be pared away, but for them to have the freedom and trust to be more joyfully themselves.  And then I’m challenged to think of what help I could offer or obstacles I might be creating to their task of being a vivid, delightful saint.

Cry Woof: You write about using the Hail Mary as a way to break a sinful habit: if you started to pray it when thinking uncharitable thoughts, then for as long as it took you weren’t thinking uncharitable thoughts.  In Catholic terms, you were learning to use prayer to avoid a near occasion of sin, which is about as practical as it gets.  Have you found other forms of prayer with such simple, practical benefits?

Leah: The Divine Office, with its psalms assigned to particular hours, helps impose some order and limits on my day.  It’s easy for me to over-schedule, thinking I can just stay up later or eat very dark chocolate (I like it better than coffee) and manage to do everything by sheer force of effort.  But the Divine Office is scheduled outside my control – I can’t stay up late and thereby make up Morning Office if I miss it; it would make no sense to pray it at midnight!  The Divine Office is a sign of contradiction to the way I try to live by default and helps remind me that I have to choose what gets my time and attention – I can’t make more of either by willing it.

Read the rest at Will’s blog…


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