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2 Introducing a Way of Prayer The Practice and the Knowing of the Trinity Prayer St. Francis, that great medieval lover of nature, attended Mass every day throughout much of his life. Dorothy Day, that great American witness to peace, nonviolence, and justice for the poor, did the same. As we continue to consider the journey before us, I will not ask you to emulate such saintly practices—at least, not exactly. But I will ask you to think about the importance of spiritual practices more generally and of one spiritual practice in particular: saying the Trinity Prayer. Why? Because, we can learn from great spiritual forebears like Francis and Dorothy Day. And, more particularly, because today most of us live in a culture of secularity, which makes it difficult for many to pray. Yes, in the United States we have our megachurches, bursting at the seams with members who love to talk about praying. We have our television evangelists who command audiences in the millions and who have the habit of offering highly dramatic public prayers. Our presidents also generally like to be thought of as champions of prayer. They make a practice of attending highly publicized prayer breakfasts now and again. That presidential practice sends a message: we are a nation at prayer. Or so we are led to believe by media reports and, sometimes, by our own observations. Even 20 percent of the religiously nonaffiliated in the United States, the Nones, report that they pray every day.1 I would imagine that the percentage of Nones-Sympathizers in our churches who pray every day may be even higher. Still, the truth is that it is not easy to pray, at least not for many Americans today. Even in the ranks of those who like to think of themselves as persons of prayer, finding the time to do so appears to be a monumental challenge. This spiritual problematic is sometimes said to be the result of the hectic pace 21 of our lives. How can you say your prayers when you’re still on the crowded commuter train at 7 p.m., and when what you really want to do when you get home is have a cocktail and collapse into bed? How can you say your prayers when you have just finished seeing two additional clients and your supervisor wants you to see yet another, never mind the fact that your two young children are waiting at home for their supper, with a frustrated babysitter who should have departed long before? How can you say your prayers when you’ve just finished another day of job searching and you don’t seem to have any inner energy left for anyone or anything? How can you say your prayers when you have a term paper due tomorrow and you know that you’re going to have to stay up all night to finish it? Others look beyond the hectic pace of our lives to explain the difficulty of praying by pointing to the much discussed materialism of our culture. We are in love with things, not with God, they observe. Why should we pray to God? Still others maintain that ours is a “culture of narcissism” (Christopher Lasch). Why should we look to God with full devotion in prayer when we’re so preoccupied with looking at ourselves in the mirror? Then, some observe, there is the agnosticism, even the atheism, that some prominent natural scientists seem to think is necessary if they are to be true to the scientific method. Doesn’t that agnosticism and perhaps that atheism leach into the minds and hearts of many of those who study science? How can you pray if you’re under such influences? Finally, there are the perennial questions about the goodness of God, which have been hugely amplified in our time, in the wake of the Holocaust and the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the global hunger crisis and other monstrous evils. How could a good God permit such things? Perhaps, some think, there is no God who cares enough to hear our prayers. So why pray? I will return to this last wrenching question—technically, it is called the issue of “theodicy”—in some detail in the following pages. First, however, in this chapter I invite you to bracket thoughts about the spiritual dynamics of our era, which make it so difficult to pray, and to think about something much more mundane. Consider the truth of this...

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