Lenten Prayer

Within the Lenten season, we have three pillars that we follow to help and guide us.

The first, I touched on a bit last week and that is fasting or giving up of something. The second one that we focus on during this season is prayer. Yes, we should be praying each and every day of the year and not just during the Lenten season, but this is also a time of renewal of our lives. Lent is a time of cleansing and renewal.

This is not a new idea, our Jewish ancestors did something similar with their households, before the feast of Passover, it was and still is custom to do a full and thorough cleaning of the house, as they say, from top to bottom of any room in which there was a chance that there was a trace of food, specifically “chametz” which is leavening. This process sometimes begins as far out as a month before Passover, and this is a cleansing to make sure that they are ready for the coming Passover of God.

We also have a cleansing of our souls and that comes from this Season of Lent in which we clean with Fasting, Prayer, and Almsgiving. Prayer is the thing that we can do constantly in our lives to help us grow closer to God and then help us grow closer to each other.

Within the Church, we have many different prayers styles and the highest form of prayer is of course the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is a form of prayer called corporate prayer, or prayer in which we come together in a group to do. This type of prayer could also include the praying of the Rosary with others, common recitation of a prayer in which priests, deacons, and religious are promised called the Liturgy of the Hours, or other prayers in which we pray together.

The other kind of prayer is private prayer, this is just as it sounds, we pray in private, just like Jesus reminds us that we can go into our inner room and pray to our Heavenly Father in private. Our rich tradition of prayer includes many different kinds of prayer, wrote prayer which is the praying of memorized prayers like the Lord’s Prayer or the Hail Mary, Scripture study prayer, devotional prayer which is that simple conversation with God, and so many others that I could spend hundreds of pages explaining.

The key is to find a prayer style that you find will draw you into that relationship with God, because in the end, that is the whole reason for prayer, to build our relationship with the Lord and to be able to then share that relationship with others. God loves us so much that he wants us to be with him. While having a good, quiet, and set amount of time to sit and pray is the best, it does not always work out that we can do that, but even in the busyness of the day we can find little times to pray. It can be while we are driving, or waiting in line for something or some other creative time, the key is to make that time to pray, especially during this wonderful season of Lent.

Fr. Ken Halbur