How can I teach my children to pray?

Q: Dear Father John,  I have prayed for days and months for my son, who, thanks be to God, has finally begun rehabilitation from his drug addiction. I feel that many of my prayers have been answered, but I now feel a burden on my heart to teach him to pray. How can I do that?

A: Thank you for sharing this brief testimony, which reminds all of us that we live in a fallen world, but that God’s grace is active and powerful in redeeming that world. I can’t help whispering a “thank you” to our Lord for bringing your son back to a path of hope. It is not an easy path, but it is a good one. Keep praying for your son!

Your questions is a good one. How do we teach other people to pray, especially our children? In general, it is easier to do when the children are younger, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible when they are older. If your children are mature adults living on their own, the best way would probably be to invite them to parish activities where prayer would be happening, or to recommend some books on prayer – though they may not respond as generously as you would like to these invitations. In any case, I will offer three suggestions, which, I hope, can be adjusted to children of any age.

The Acorn Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree

By far, the most important factor in teaching your children to pray is your own example. By far. By far. Let me say it again: by far. This is common sense, but it is also supported by an abundant and still-accumulating amount of psychological research. The most influential factor in children’s development, even through and out of adolescence, is parental example. This is how we are made: to learn behavior from our parents. This is why the cultural attack on the natural structure family life is so threatening to our society. But I digress. If you pray regularly, and your children know this and see this, they will find it much easier to weave prayer into their own lives, and, what is even more important in the long run, to consider prayer an essential part of being human. This doesn’t mean that you should pray in order to be seen by your children. That can smack of Pharisaical hypocrisy. But it does mean that if you don’t have a regular, heartfelt, maturing life of prayer, it will be extremely difficult for you to teach your children to pray.

Along the same lines, your children need to see that your relationship with God affects positively your daily life. This doesn’t mean that they expect you to be perfect – even saints lose their tempers, fall into bad moods, and sometimes say the wrong thing. Certainly, as we grow spiritually and come closer to Christ, that will happen less frequently and less violently. But in the meantime, the way we show that our religion matters, that our prayer life is relevant, is by recovering quickly and humbly from our temper tantrums and self-pity parties. Apologize, make reparation if necessary, brush yourself off (spiritually speaking), and get back in the saddle. This example of humility and confidence in God is powerful, and it will build trust with your children.

The Relevance of Jesus

The mere fact that you pray, and that your prayer impacts your life (helping you gradually grow in virtue and wisdom), is the first and most essential way to teach your children to pray. But it doesn’t stop there. This example has to teach them not only the importance of prayer, but the method of prayer. Prayer is more than saying prayers. Prayer is a way of living out a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Your children need to see in you a living friendship with Jesus Christ. One effective way for you to model this for your children is by praying for them, out loud, in your own words. If your children are young, you can do this while you put them to bed. After you tuck them in, you can sit on the bedside with your hand on them, and ask God to bless them, guide them, and protect them. This teaches your children that God is not an abstract force that has to be propitiated by going to Church or rifling through the Rosary, but that he is a real person, caring and present, with whom we can speak about what matters to us. Another way to teach them that prayer is a living relationship with God is by going off to pray at moments of tension or conflict. Cut off the heated argument (if it’s getting heated it’s not going to do any good anyway) and let your children know that you feel a need to go and pray about this. The message? God is relevant, present, active in your life.

The Domestic Church

Finally, don’t be afraid to establish family traditions with regards to prayer. Pray together as a family on a regular basis. Even if your children are older, and you have never had these kinds of traditions, start them and invite your children to join in them. They don’t have to be complicated, but if you pray together, you are teaching your children to pray. Grace before meals, a short prayer when you start a trip or go out the door, prayers before bed or morning prayers – why not do these together, as a family, involving everyone? Every Catholic family is called to be a domestic church, an outpost of Christ’s Kingdom. By praying together as a family, you raise this awareness. Some families create a prayer room or prayer corner where they pray together, replete with candles, holy images, and even a small altar. Special prayer intentions for family members, relatives, or upcoming events can even be writing down and placed on the family altar… These kinds of traditions may strike us as exaggerated, but think about it for a minute: are they? Only if the normal thing in life is to exclude God from our daily lives – and the fact that practices such as these disorient us at first glance shows that our secularized society has contaminated our world view. Again, the point isn’t to turn every Catholic household into a monastery. Rather, the point is to make prayer as normal a family activity as eating – after all, it is as necessary for our soul’s health as food is for our body’s.

It may not be immediately clear how you can apply these ideas to your particular family situation. But don’t worry. God wants your son to learn how to pray even more than you do. He is already at work in your son’s heart. Whatever effort you make, however clumsy or small it may appear to you, will be turned to eternally good use by the Lord.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

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Fallen away family member – What can I do?

Q: Dear Father John, how can I convince family members who have fallen away from the faith to come back to God and the Church?

A: You can’t. Only God can do that. But you can help. Here are some thoughts about how.

There is more going on in this question than meets the eye. Almost every believer faces a question like this at some point in their journey. It can take different forms. Some of my priest colleagues have been ordained for years, and their parents are still estranged from the Church. Some extremely faithful Catholics are still stuck in sibling feuds that seem to have no end in sight. One faith-filled, dedicated, and extremely intelligent grandmother I know was devastated when her very well-educated son refused to have his first child baptized. Her first reaction was, “What did I do wrong?” Her second reaction was to beg God to change her son’s heart. She prayed and prayed, for years. When she died (recently), her grandchildren were still un-baptized and her own soul was in torment because of it. Was it her fault that her prayer wasn’t answered? Should she have done something different? Did she not pray enough?… Questions like these can assault us ferociously. We need to know how to deal with them.

The Issue at Stake

The issue has to do with intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is praying for others, interceding for them. Examples of this kind of prayer are found throughout both the Old and New Testaments. Moses interceded for the people of Israel after their reversion to idolatry (the golden calf incident, cf. Exodus 32). Many of Christ’s miracles are performed in response to people interceding with him on behalf of someone they love who is suffering (e.g. raising Jairus’s daughter from the dead, Luke 8). The long tradition of the Church encourages us to pray for others, to “Never get tired of staying awake to pray for all God’s holy people…” as St Paul puts it (Ephesians 6:18). This may seem obvious, but it isn’t. Some modern schools of spirituality discourage this type of prayer, as if it were an immature, materialistic way to relate to God. Not all. God has revealed himself as Father, and we are very needy children. When we bring our needs and those of our loved ones to him in prayer, we are exercising our confidence in him, our Christian love, our hope, and our faith – these are the core virtues of our Christian adventure. God is pleased when we intercede for others in prayer.

That’s the background; now let’s get down to brass tacks. Three key elements go into healthy intercessory prayer.

The Starting Line?

First, it has to begin from an awareness of God’s goodness, faithfulness, and omnipotence. This is expressed in the first place by praying for things that are in harmony with God’s will. It would be an insult to God to ask him to send someone to hell, for example, since he wills the salvation of all people. This awareness is also expressed in the one of our prayer: we should pray with confidence. Jesus put it succinctly: “I tell you, therefore, everything you ask and pray for, believe that you have it already, and it will be yours.” The Old Testament offers beautiful examples of this aspect of prayer. When Judith and Esther are interceding for Israel in the midst of national crises, they spend the first half of their prayer calling to mind all the wonderful things God has done for Israel in the past. They are stirring up their confidence in him, tuning into God’s wavelength.

The Mysterious Core

Second, intercessory prayer should be offered with complete trust in his wisdom. In other words, we have to realize that although God always answers our prayers, he doesn’t always answer them as we want him to. He may say no. He may say not yet. He may say yes. The Irish have a phrase that they tack onto expressions of hope and desire: “…please God.” We should tack this onto our intercessory prayers. “Lord, if it be pleasing to you, bring my father back to the sacraments…” When we are asking God to intervene in someone’s life, we are touching an awesome mystery. God never violates human freedom. And so, when he moves hearts, he does so in a way that we cannot fathom. We have to remember this as we approach him with our needs and petitions; otherwise we end up becoming dictatorial and presumptuous.

The Sign of Authenticity

Third, we have to back up our prayer with our life. This has two levels. First, there is the level of our own Christian journey. The closer we are following Christ, the more powerful our prayer: “The heartfelt prayer of someone upright works very powerfully” (James 5:16). If we are failing to make a decent effort to fulfill God’s will in our own lives, our prayer that God’s will might be done in someone else’s life will be hampered by spiritual dissonance. Second, there is the level of our collaboration in achieving the very thing we are asking God to bring about. If we are praying for the conversion of a family member, for example, we should always ask ourselves what we can do to give Providence more room to work. This collaboration may take the form of talking to the person we are praying for, trying to give them reasons to come closer to the Church. It may also take less direct forms, like finding ways to help them in their life’s struggles, to serve them with sincerity and kindness, as Christ would have us. We should always ask ourselves if there is a “next step” we can take. It is possible to overdo it on this score – to end up badgering someone instead of encouraging them. We have to ask God for light and just do our best, trusting that God will put it to good use.

A Final Conundrum

But let’s say we are have been praying for a particular intention for a long time, with all three elements more or less in place. How long is long enough? Does continuing to pray for the same intention show a lack of confidence in God, a refusal to take “no” for an answer? How can we know when we should move on and leave it in God’s hands?

No hard and fast rules can guide use here. Jesus commanded us to be persistent in our prayer (cf. the parable of the unjust judge, Luke 18). St. Monica prayed incessantly for ten years before her son, St. Augustine, returned from his prodigal peregrinations. Yet sometimes, we wonder if we just need to move on. Here the wisdom of the Church comes to our aid. If a particular intention is weighing heavily on our heart, we can presume that God wants us to pray for it. And we can do that in many ways. For example, we can have a Mass or series of Masses offered for it, or offer a special novena for that intention, or receive Holy Communion on nine First Fridays and pray for it, or make a pilgrimage for it… We Catholics have a treasure-trove of devotions and traditional pious practices that we can dip into in order to give some kind of objective parameters to our intercessory prayer. At the end of the novena, we can leave the intention in God’s hands, confident that our prayers have been heard. Or, if the intention still weighs heavily on our heart, we can continue to pray for it. The Holy Spirit will guide us, giving us his interior peace as we faithfully follow his lead.

In the end, however, we cannot control other people’s freedom, not even through our prayer. If we find ourselves refusing to accept that simple fact, we need to take a healthy dose of humility and let God be God.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC