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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

2A

How do you make time for prayer in your daily life? What works best?

What motivates you to pray? What are your personal reasons for praying?

What is the most inspiring or memorable moment of prayer you have had? What was special about it?

What other ideas or questions strike you from this part of the film?

 

2B

What difference does prayer make to your own life? Does it affect your thinking or decisions or actions?

Why is it sometimes hard to be honest with God? What gets in the way?

Do you get distracted in prayer? How do you deal with distractions?

What other ideas or questions strike you from this part of the film?

 

KEY IDEAS FROM THE FILM

The first rule: “The secret of prayer is to pray”. Or as the sports brand Nike used to say: “Just do it”. In other words, don’t get over-complicated. Prayer is a relationship, a conversation, not a theory. At some point, if you believe in God, you have to start. Even if you are unsure what to do or what to say, you have to take the first step. Yes, it’s a risk. But every relationship is a risk. God can be trusted more than anyone or anything else in the world. The only way to pray is to start praying.

The second rule: “It won’t happen by chance”. You need to fix a time for prayer, to put it in the calendar, and then it will happen. It’s true that spontaneous prayer is a wonderful thing. You can pray at any time – at work, on the bus, doing the shopping, having a cup of tea. But perhaps the most important decision you can make in your spiritual life is to set aside some fixed time for prayer each day. It won’t happen just by chance. Life will take over. It doesn’t matter how much time. It might be just five minutes in the morning or five minutes at night. The simple fact of making the time, putting it in the diary, means that it might actually happen.

The third rule: “Pray as you can, not as you can’t”. There are a thousand ways of praying, and lots of people, like me now, will give you advice. It’s great to try different things and learn from others. But you have to find what works for you. If something is just not helping you, then try something else. It’s different if you are a priest or in consecrated life, when there are certain set prayers that you have to say each day. But if you are a lay person, then you have complete freedom to pray in whatever way you wish, as long as you are going to Mass each week and going to confession when you need to.

The fourth rule: “Honesty is the key to God’s heart”. You can be completely honest with God in your prayer. You don’t have to pretend. I’d go further and say that prayer only really begins when we start to be honest with God. Very often we try to hide things from God, and we don’t tell him what we are really thinking or feeling. It’s strange, God knows us inside out, and loves us so deeply, however imperfect we are. What a difference it makes just to be honest with him, to tell him the truth, to trust him: to say, “this is what I am thinking, this is what I am feeling, this is what I have done, this is what I am longing for”. When Jesus met Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, he said to him, “What do you want me to do for you”, and Bartimaeus replied, “Master, let me see”. He spoke from his heart. We don’t have to pretend.

Fifth: “Prayer is always Trinitarian”. It’s true that we might express our prayer in different ways. Sometimes we simply pray to God; sometimes more directly to the Father, or to Jesus, or to the Holy Spirit. And we can pray to Mary and the saints, meaning we ask them to pray for us. But every Christian prayer, ultimately, is based on our faith in God the Most Holy Trinity, One God in three Divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Even if we don’t put it into words, we always pray with Jesus Christ our Saviour, to God the Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit. We never pray alone. Our prayer is united with the prayer of Jesus, and with the prayer of the whole Church. That’s why Christian prayer is always “in the name of Jesus”, or “through Christ our Lord”, because we are always praying with him.

The sixth rule: “Faithfulness is more important than feeling”. It’s very easy to judge our prayer based on how we are feeling. Did I feel peaceful? Did I feel close to God? Did I feel inspired? Or was I tired, distracted, bored, empty? It’s inevitable that we will have ups and downs in our prayer life. It’s a relationship. But we shouldn’t give up whenever we have a difficult patch. Prayer is sometimes dry, or dark, or boring. What matters is our faithfulness to prayer, and above all our faithfulness to God and his to us.

The seventh and final rule: “Pray with your mind and your heart and not just your lips”. Very often we can say our prayers without actually thinking about what we are saying, or we can be present in church without actually paying attention to what is happening. Prayer can become an external ritual without any inner conviction. Instead of this, we want to try to pray with sincerity and love, giving attention to the words we are saying, opening our hearts as well as our minds to God. We want to think about what we are saying, and believe what we are thinking. The heart, in this sense, is not just a place of emotions, it is the centre of our being. So if we can open our hearts to God when we pray it means we can truly know him and become one with him.