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PAGE 5—December 6,1973
Praying Together
BY JANE WILLIAMS PUGEL
We’ve all heard that old phrase about the family that prays
together staying together.
In this age of proof positive, I’ve always been surprised that
someone didn’t appoint a task force to make a study that would
determine once and for all if that is indeed true - or if family
praying can be said to lead in just the opposite direction. Study
or no study, most of us believe in family prayer; the problem is
doing something about it.
Concerning prayer, I’ve often wondered what children think
we are talking about when we are rattling along in the typical
souped-up rhetoric that has always been considered necessary
Family Prayer
BY FATHER CARL J. PFEIFER, S.J.
“Are our youngsters being taught their prayers?” “Do the
new religion programs teach the traditional prayers?”
In my experience of several years of frequent meetings with
parents and religion teachers, these or similar questions about
prayer inevitably arise. Parents today seem to have a genuine
concern that their children learn the traditional prayers of the
Church. This is a healthy sign of parents’ care for their
children’s growth in faith.
My first response to such questions is to reassure the
questioners that the newer religion programs do contain the
traditional prayers. In fact, the better programs place much
more emphasis on prayer than did earlier catechisms. The young
today are exposed not only to prayers such as the Our Father
and the Hail Mary, Glory Be to the Father, and Apostles’ Creed,
but they are introduced also to the beautiful prayers of the
Bible, especially the Psalms, and to many of the prayers from
the Church’s liturgy.
The new religion programs reveal a serious concern that the
young learn not only prayers, but that they can learn also to
pray. Learning to pray is much more important than learning
prayers. The traditional prayers of the Church are a rich
resource for learning to pray.
After proposing evidence that catechetical programs today do
give serious attention to guiding the young in prayer, I find it
necessary to point out that this is actually of secondary
importance. Children best learn to pray not at school, not in
religion class, but at home. Family prayer is the best school of
prayer for the young.
for talking to God. A relative of mine told me about his
three-year-old son who sat through a lengthy church service and
finally, during a reflective silence, whispered loudly, “Okay, but
what is God doing now?”
Right in our own family, a young daughter called our church
“Harold’s place” for a while. We discovered that her personal
Lord’s Prayer ran, “Our Father who are in Heaven, Harold by
thy name ...” In my own early days, a child in my catechism
class asked how come guardian angels are too thin to guard us
properly? The prayer “Angel of God, my guardian dear” ended,
in her mind, with “Ever this day be at my side, too light to
guard, to rule and guide.” Poor children . . .
Last Sunday we realized that it was Advent already. Once
again we are in the season of prayerful preparation for what is
the greatest family feast of the Church year. For Christmas
involves a mother and a father, a birth, welcomed visitors, gifts,
good news. Maybe Advent is a good time to examine your
family prayer life.
What kind of joint prayer should families engage in? And
when and how? The problems of pulling ourselves together for
such exercises seem to have grown and multiplied. The days are
apparently gone when the family knelt down daily for the
Rosary, some Bible reading or other group prayers.
It seems most possible for our own families to try for a few
words with God at a meal or some time when most of us are
together. Our family happens to eat breakfast together, and we
have formed the habit of offering our day and everything in it
to God. Any personal petitions or thanksgivings are made then
too. For us, it works.
Other people ask a different member each day to make the
special prayer for thanks before the main family meal. A friend
told me that her son, called upon to ask the blessing, cast an evil
eye over his plate of liver and onions and muttered, “Thank you
God, for this - awful stuff.”
As for the words involved, it is a simple matter. We should
talk to God in our own most simple, direct language. Even the
formal prayers of the Church can be reworded for family use so
that the youngest will understand. We have rewritten several for
our own use, including the Stations of the Cross and the Act of
Contrition. For what sense does it make to talk to the person
you love the most if you don’t know what you are saying?
Family prayer should help the members to live in an
atmosphere of faith. Prayer should be not so much an
occasional formal pronouncement, but a sort of on-going
conversation with God that praises and loves, accepts, thanks,
acknowledges - and occasionally asks. Just the sort of
conversation we have with loved ones in the family, only this
one can be partly silent.
However you work it, family prayer should eventually allow
us parents and our children simply to make a day-long “Yes” to
God, as Mary did in the first Advent so long ago.
“MOST OF US BELIEVE in family prayer; the teaches her children to pray. (NC Photo by Paul
problem is doing something about it.” A mother Tucker)
{All Articles On This Page Copyrighted 1973 by N.C. News Service)
Know Your Faith
The Roman Empire’s Sputnik
BY STEVE LANDREGAN
I remember a Sister recalling her own experience as a child. “I
can still see myself sitting in religion class with Sister Evarista.
She went over the Our Father again and again with me and
others in the class. I must admit that this exercise did not teach,
me to pray. I learned to pray at home. I learned the importance
and value of prayer in my life. My parents prayed at every meal.
We prayed the family rosary each evening-which I frequently
found tiring and boring at the time. We thanked God for good
things and asked his help in various needs. Prayer was as much a
part of our family life as was eating, sleeping, playing and
working.”
Children learn to pray not as much by being taught to recite
prayers, but by experiencing their parents’ praying. One of my
most vivid childhood memories is of my parents earnestly asking
God to let me live. It was very late in the night and they had
been told earlier that evening by the doctor that I was close to
death from pneumonia. Their praying left an indelible
impression one me.
Such genuine prayer need not be scheduled or planned. Each
family has to find its own rhythm. For some it may be desirable
to have regular prayers, such as at meals or bedtime. Others may
find it more meaningful to pray when prayer seems timely-like
my parents praying during the time that I was deathly ill. It is
not so much the quantity of prayer that matters.
Parents teach their children to pray by praying themselves. If
they truly pray, than their efforts to teach their children
traditional prayers may bear fruit. If they do not pray, neither
they nor religion teachers will normally have too much success
in teaching their children to pray, no matter how well they
teach them the traditional prayers of the Church.
The parental questions about textbooks and new approaches
to religious education are understandable and express a genuine
concern. They deserve forthright answers. Part of an honest
response to their questions involves asking parents more basic
questions: “Do you pray?” “Do your children ever see you
praying?” “Do you ever pray as a family?” “Do you and your
children pray together?”
BY FATHER JOSEPH M. CHAMPLIN
Pope Paul VI used his August 22 general audience as the
occasion to issue a “Prayer Decalogue” or ten commandments
designed to help Christians pray better. Prayer, our Holy Fathe r
insisted, whether individual and private or public and collective,
is the Church’s highest expression, fundamental nourishment
and basic principle.
Two priests in the Boston archdiocese wholeheartedly agree
and have experienced successful efforts with new prayer forms
in their respective parishes.
At one point in his 22 years of ministry, Father Edmund
Svioka served as president of the priest’s senate. He now is
administrator of St. Patrick’s Church in Roxbury, a once heavily
Irish, middle-class community which has become an inner city
parish with a mixture of blacks, Irish and Italian whites, Puerto
Ricans and Portuguese from Cape Verdi.
At the beginning of this school year, Father Svioka brought
his extensive staff - ten priests and 38 sisters - together for a
unique retreat. It started Sunday night and ran daily through
Friday with morning and afternoon conferences plus an evening
film-discussion session. This renewal week took place within the
parish itself; the administrator had arranged for a local scripture
scholar and a religious education expert to make the
presentations.
They covered on successive days the humanity of Christ,
discipleship to Jesus, freedom and law, prophecy and
community. During Friday’s final hours, participants worked on
practical ways to implement the lofty ideals built up in the
retreat’s earlier moments.
Teddy Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet around the world
to impress other nations with the power and strength of the
United States. The propaganda value of Russia being the first
nation to place a satellite in orbit, or of the United States
making the first manned moon flight was not lost to the
planners in Moscow and Washington.
In the days of the Roman Empire the same problem existed
for Rome, specifically to impress upon the people of the Middle
East that Rome didn’t have to take a back seat to Egypt,
Mesopotamia, Greece, or anyone else.
With this in mind, we could correctly refer to Baalbek as the
Roman Sputnik. How’s that? You say you’ve never heard of
Baalbek. No matter. The Romans weren’t trying to impress you.
But the world of the ancient Near East heard about Baalbek -
and they were properly awed by it.
The significant deepening of their inner spirit and common
bond which resulted was not really a great surprise. Throughout
the previous year, the same group had met once a week for 30
minutes of shared prayer planned by the sisters, following by a
meal and, afterwards, a eucharistic liturgy.
Father James Hickey is quite a bit younger - five years
ordained - and labors in St. Mary’s parish, a mushrooming
suburban congregation in Randolph, Massachusetts.
Two years ago its worship committee planned an
experimental and devotional prayer service in church after the
Holy Thursday liturgy. The positive response to this pilot
project encouraged planners to repeat the hour of prayer (8:00 -
9:00 p.m.) on a monthly basis. Prepared and presided over by
lay persons, it draws an average of 30 participants and has
attracted as many as 90.
The holy hour format leaves ample periods for quiet prayer
and often concludes by a priest celebrating benediction with the
Blessed Sacrament.
Following is another example of special parish worship at St.
Mary’s: During its weekday 12:10 Eucharist the several dozen
assembled join with their celebrant in reciting Midday Prayer
from the Liturgy of the Hours.
After the entrance hymn or antiphon and greeting, the
community alternately recites the assigned psalms, the priest
leads them in the opening prayer, and then Mass continues with
the scriptural readings.
Baalbek is a temple city. It is nestled high in the fertile plain
of the Bekaa between the Lananon and the Antilebanon ranges.
Even in ruins, its size and magnificence overwhelm the visitor.
Baalbek was built to outshine all the other existing temples of
the Roman Empire. It dwarfed the shrines of Byblos. The
majesty of the Acropolis in Athens paled beside the temple city.
Next to the temples of Baalbek, the Pharaohs’ masterpieces at
Thebes and Karnack were insignificant.
Baalbek was created to manifest Rome’s ascendency, to
herald the Empire’s progress and prosperity, and to stabilize its
control over the restless Near East. It accomplished all three
purposes admirably.
When it came to administering an Empire, the Romans were
no amateurs. One thing they realized was that conquered
peoples were much more docile when the conquerer did not add
“SOME 50 INDIVIDUALS from all over the area
gather for this three hour session which consists of
shared prayer, a eucharistic liturgy, coffee and
conversation and a final laying on of hands and prayer
over people in need.” A laying on of hands. (NC Staff
Photo)
insult to injury by imposing an alien culture upon the occupied
country. It was a lesson many other Empire builders never
learned, to their sorrow.
Most of the Near Eastern cultures were identified with a
religious cult. In Phoenicia and Syria it was with the cult of
Baal. Baal is a generic name for a deity but can also be used to
designate a human person to whom loyalty and homage are due.
It can best be translated by the English word “lord.”
In Syria and Phoenicia the term generally referred to Hadad,
the Syrian sun-god whose dynasty dates from the second or
third millenium before Christ. When the Romans arrived in the
Near East, Alexander the Great and his successors had imposed
much of the Greek culture as well as the language of the area.
This was known as Hellenization.
During this period Baalbek had gotten a Greek name, Helios,
which is simply the Greek word for sun.
Now our Roman friends had their own set of gods, but being
polytheists, to them one god was as good as another and they
were perfectly willing to worship Jupiter and accept the fact
that the Syro-Phoenicians’ Baal or Helios was just another
expression of the same worship. The way they accomplished
their little charade was to give Jupiter the last name of Helios.
Thus the god to be worshipped at their new temple city was
Jupiter Heliopolitanus, which was the same as saying Jupiter
Baal.
To the Phoenicians Baal was traditionally associated with
Astarte, the female goddess, and Simios, the son. The Romans
accepted this triadic deity and let Astarte represent Venus while
Simios became the local manifestation of Mercury.
The place was referred to as Heliopolis by the Greeks and the
Romans, which means the city of the sun or the sun god. But
the Syro-Phoenicians called it Baalbek, which means the city of
Baal. Whatever it was called, it was magnificent. There were
found the largest stone blocks ever used and the boldest
architectural engineering feat accomplished by man.
Although the site had been a sacred one from very ancient
times, it was Augustus Caesar who began construction of the
temples that took 250 years to complete. The Roman emperors,
Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius, Marcus Aurelius, Septimus Severus,
Caracalla and Philip the Arab, all furthered the construction. 5
The Byzantines followed the Romans and converted the
temples into churches, finally, the Arabs came and transformed
the temple city into a fortress.
Today, there are relics of ancient Phoenicia, Greece, the
Roman and the Byzantine Empires and the Arab Empire all
within the precincts of Baalbek. Julian Huxley has referred to
Baalbek as the showplace of Lebanon. It is also one of the most
interesting places in the Lands of the Bible.
The Parish Family Prays