Thank you to everyone who prayed for and supported the Little Sisters of the Poor who visited our parish last weekend. It was an opportunity for us to fulfill two of our Lenten practices: almsgiving and prayer. It may have also fulfilled our fasting as well if we gave up money to the sisters that otherwise would have been used for food or drink. There are so many opportunities to live out these three practices this Lent and each builds off of the other. Last week I talked about fasting, but this week I would like to talk about prayer. I would like to speak in particular about the pitfalls of prayer (or what we should avoid). The first pitfall is perhaps the most obvious: we put God to the test when we pray. Last week we heard in the Gospel, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” If we put God to the test, then we take a higher position in relation to God (and make ourselves God). We test God in our prayer, when we base our faith in God on whether or not he answers our prayers. “If you answer my prayer Lord, I will follow, but if you do not, then you must not exist or you do not take an interest in me.” At the same time, if our prayer is answered, we think that it was going to happen anyway due to natural causes or coincidence. Notice that our Lord doesn’t tell us “Ask and you’ll get whatever you ask for.” He promises us that our prayers will be heard, and our Father will respond with what we need, rather than what we want (ideally what we want corresponds to what God knows we need). God is after all a loving father. Secondly, when we pray, we sometimes turn our attention away from God and neighbor and to ourselves. This involves using prayer to produce feelings by the action of our own wills. For instance, if we ask God for charity, what we really want are charitable feelings. When we pray for courage, what we really want is to feel brave. When we ask God for forgiveness, what we are really asking is for the feeling of forgiveness. In other words, we try to manufacture these feelings in ourselves by our own strength. In this way we measure the effectiveness of our prayers by how well a desired feeling is produced. Of course, this is bound to fail, because our feelings always depend on our current state: whether we are currently well, fit, ill, tired, sad, and so on. Remember we are creatures; and so our bodily posture, state, and so on, can affect our prayer. We need to make sure that when we pray it is not a matter of us trying to produce a feeling. Instead, our prayers are directed to God and our desire for real charity, real forgiveness, and real strength. The third pitfall happens when we pray to something other than God. Our knowledge and understanding of God takes time to develop in this life. Our idea of God may contain many incorrect and contradictory ideas. The danger lies in praying to an object we have created, rather than God Himself. In this way we create an idol; and very often the idol tells us what we want to hear rather than what we need to hear. The real God knows us better than we know ourselves. We advance in prayer when we attribute to God that which is proper to him and not our own subjective ideas. So we acknowledge a twofold truth; that we can come to know God more and more by what he has revealed to us about Himself, but that knowledge is like straw when compared to God’s infinite grandeur. In this way we become receptive to his teachings. Adam and Eve rejected this receptivity after the Fall as symbolized by them covering their nakedness. In this battle the Church, her teachings, the sacraments, theologians and the saints are our great allies. I hope that helps everyone have a fruitful prayer life and conversation with God!