Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Putting Into the Deep
September 11, 2009
In a catechesis on July 1, Pope Benedict declared what is the “first task” and “the true path of sanctification” for a Christian — prayer — and why St. John Vianney is so important not just for priests but for all of us: “St. John Vianney is undoubtedly a model of an existence made prayer.”
The Holy Father implies that each of us is called to do more than “say” our prayers; we’re called to become our prayer, by lives that praise, thank, and petition God and request, receive and share his mercy. The most important thing in prayer is not what we say, but what we are; not what we have on our lips but in our hearts.
This is the truth about Christian prayer. God the Holy Spirit seeks to transform our way of being so that, as a son or a daughter, we relate to God the Father in Christ the Son. St. Augustine taught that qualis ores, “how you are when you pray,” is far more important than quid ores, “what you say when you pray.” The subject of prayer is always more important than the object of what we ask for. The great doctor of the Church continued that it is Jesus “who prays for us, in us and by us. He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our master and he is prayed by us as our God. Therefore, we recognize our voice in him and his voice in ourselves.” This great transformation occurs, St. Paul says, when “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts crying out, ‘Abba, Father!’” (Gal 4:6).
An “existence made prayer” is God’s goal for our life. This is the means by which we will be able to carry out St. Paul’s imperative, “Pray always,” (Eph 6:18; 1 Thess 5:17), by allowing God to transform our existence into a constant loving dialogue and offering to God.
This is, admittedly, not what many of us learned in Catholic schools or CCD. The Lord is asking more of us than to recite our prayers before we go to bed, or even to make a daily holy hour. He wants us to give him permission to help us literally become a prayer.
This is why the example of St. John Vianney, a “model of an existence made prayer,” is so important and timely. Pope Benedict said in his June letter to priests that the Curé of Ars taught his parishioners about prayer “primarily by the witness of his life. It was from his example that they learned to pray.” His great triumph in Ars was that, even though very few of the residents of Ars prayed at home or in Church when he arrived, by the time he died, many were excelling in the life of prayer thanks to his witness and instruction. Pope Benedict hopes that the Curé of Ars’ example can have a similar impact on us.
John Vianney learned how to pray at a very early age from his mother. She talked to him constantly about Jesus, Mary, and his guardian angel. When he was a little older, she helped him learn not just the words of the Our Father and Hail Mary but how to say those words with love to God and to the Blessed Mother. He would stay up at night attentively listening to his mother read Bible stories, learning about how so many heroic figures said “thy will be done” to God not just with lips but with lives.
Many young children learn how to pray grace, but the future saint took it more seriously than most. One busy day, Marie Vianney hastily placed a meal before her infamished son before turning to other tasks. She returned about 15 minutes later and observed that John hadn’t touched the food. When she asked him why he hadn’t, the infant put his hand to his forehead and waited for her to begin the sign of the Cross.
Later when John was four, and before the terror, he would implore his mother to take him to Mass each morning. There at Mass, in contrast to kids his age who would generally seek to be the center of attention, he placed his attention on the priest and what the priest was doing, to the great edification of adults present. His spirit of prayer would grow as he later observed clandestine priests up close, either in the secret Masses in area barns, or in his own home, where would hide from the revolutionary authorities seeking to put them to death.
Once he had reached the age of reason, his father Matthew decided it was time for him to start working on the farm. There he learned how to make his work a prayer. He’d take a small wooden statue of the Blessed Mother and place her in the hollow of a tree, asking her to watch over him as he cared for the sheep or did manual labor harvesting crops. When he was alone, he would rejoice that he could pray out loud. Whether other children accompanied him, he asked them to pray with them, often teaching them the prayers beforehand. When they wanted to take a nap in the fields, he would agree, but secretly spend the time praying. “I was very happy in my father’s house,” he would say as an adult. “I had the time to pray to God, to meditate, to take care of my soul. In the middle of work in the field, I used to pretend that I was sleeping like the others, but I was praying to God with all my heart!” When the farmers in Ars later told him they didn’t have time to pray, he would reply from personal experience, “One cannot say that laborers or workmen do not have the time to meditate, because they can do it so easily while they work.”
Once the situation in France had calmed and he was able to enter the Seminary, his life of prayer matured as his dependence on God grew. He made it through seminary only through prayer. He would pray before the tabernacle. He would pray all the decades of the Rosary. He would make grueling pilgrimages to shrines. Through the crucible of his struggles, God helped him acquired a total confidence in prayer. He also learned from the example of his mentor, Fr. Charles Balley, how to pray with his body through corporal mortification.
Once he arrived in Ars, he gave immediate witness to how prayer was the real sustenance of his life. The residents immediately observed that he did not merely “say” the Mass, but “prayed” it. The night owls saw that he spent nearly all night praying in Church with tears before the tabernacle, begging for the conversion of his parish. They saw him pray his breviary on his knees, and with what love and conviction he glanced at the tabernacle door. When the crowds of penitents pressed upon him, he abbreviated his morning holy hour, but always took some point of meditation with him into the confessional to pray about throughout the day.
His one great desire, he told them, was to be able to lay down the yoke of parish duties so that he could run to a monastery and have more time to pray. He thought would such prayer would help him “love the good God very much.” He never really got his wish. But because he learned to turn his entire existence into a prayer, he grew in the love of God until the love of God came to take him to the monastery in heaven.
“Without prayer,” he said often to his parishioners, “life wouldn’t be supportable!” Prayer supported his life and is meant by God to sustain ours. That is why Pope Benedict says that prayer is the path to sanctification.