Originally Published in 2012*

Last summer I had a wonderful opportunity. My godson was being ordained in Vienna, Austria, at Heiligenkreuze Cistercian Abbey. He invited me to come to the ordination, and said I could stay at the monastery. I had some air miles, and my mom was available to go with me. So we went.

It was a wonderful experience. Most of all, I was happy to be there when my godson became an alter Christus, But I was also happy to be there with the monks as they prayed. I especially liked being able to have a few days where I could get up for the 5:15 am prayer, Vigils, stay through Lauds and conclude morning prayer at about 7:30 am with Mass. I came home saying that I thought monastery life looked pretty good. I felt nourished by the prayer.

I have to be honest. I don’t ordinarily spend two hours in the morning in prayer. Even now, at this stage of my life, I don’t have that much time without something I should do, and when I was homeschooling my children, I definitely didn’t have that much time available.

Now, I don’t have any trouble, and I hope you don’t either, understanding that in our vocation as wives and mothers we serve Christ in our families, and in the duties He has given us. I am not a monk, or even a nun, and I know that what Christ is going to say to me most of all, at the end, is, “Well, Laura, how did you do with those children I gave you to care for?” That’s clear to me and I embrace it. Having children, and the other obligations they bring, like laundry and dinner, precludes long periods of prayer for almost all of us.

But being at the monastery and having that time for prayer did make me think about my own prayer life. I love daily Mass, and I have been fortunate enough to be able to get to daily Mass for many years. But I have to confess that sometimes my other prayers during the day have the nature of a checklist: well, got that one done, and that one. That didn’t seem to me to be ideal, especially as I thought about my experience at the monastery.

In the book Parochial and Plain Sermons, which contains sermons Cardinal Newman gave before he was a Catholic, and which seem to me to offer real food for thought, though they also seem to me to reflect the fact that he was not yet Catholic, Blessed Newman discusses the fact that for many of us, “Religion is a weariness”. He says that we must turn from the world and love of the world, to make ourselves ‘new hearts’. “If our hearts are by nature set on the world for its own sake, and the world is one day to pass away, what are they to be set on, what to delight in, then?.... if we would be happy in the world to come, we must make us new hearts, and begin to love the things we naturally do not love.”

Now, as a Catholic, I know that all good things come from God, and that to enjoy His world, in the right way, is itself a way to Him. It is not our nature to love the wrong things, and turn from God, it is our fallen nature, darkened by sin, that makes it easy for us to love the things of the world inordinately. With that caveat, though, I was struck with this exhortation to prepare for eternity by conforming ourselves to it now, and to learn to love those things in such a way that after death we will be ready to take up our new life.

As I said a moment ago, for most of us, most of the time, we need to prepare for eternity by doing our jobs. In the short story of Tolkien called “Leaf by Niggle” the main character, Niggle, knows that a long and important journey is coming up, but he keeps putting off the preparation for it. The day finally comes when he has to catch the train, and he doesn’t have his luggage packed, or his job finished. As you read the story it becomes clear that the journey he was supposed to be preparing for was the passage into the next life, and because he is not quite ready, he has to go to a ‘hospital’ (a clever illustration of purgatory) where he learns to do the job he is given, when he is given it, because it is the job that needs to be done. He has to stop and start his jobs according to their requirements, not his inclination. He has to grow in a love for the satisfaction of a job well done. When he does, he is ready to move on to the next step: doing good works that he himself determines need to be done, and doing them in communion with another. Eventually he is ready to go on, into the heights, with the Shepherd. (It’s a great story, and I highly recommend it. I found this online with a brief search, and it is available in the collection Tree and Leaf.

Niggle became ready to go with the Shepherd, to enter Eternity as His companion and friend, by doing the jobs he was given jobs, and through them, or rather, through his attitude toward them, changing internally. He did, in the story, what Blessed Cardinal Newman exhorted us to do. I think that each of you is doing the same thing, here and now, when you take care of your children and your husband, putting their needs in front of your desires, and serving Christ in them as you do so. I want that to be clear.

Even so, my experience at the monastery made me wonder if perhaps I hadn’t been taking advantage of a kind of ‘shortcut’ provided by God in His kindness and mercy. Here is what I have in mind. Prayer seems to me to be, in a way, about friendship. It’s about friendship with God. I want to explain why I think that, and what the consequences of that fact are. Then I would like to think about the right way to pray, so that we can develop our friendship with God and be nourished with His life.

The goal of our lives is to be conformed to Christ so that we can live happily in Eternity with Him. Our issue is how to achieve that conformity. One can think about conformity as a kind of shaping, and imagine our souls as blocks of marble being ‘shaped’ to God’s image by the circumstances of our lives. The right attitude toward our jobs results in our being ‘shaped’ so that we look like God (so to speak). But it seems to me that there is another way to achieve conformity with another. It is through the friendship developed in an explicitly common life. I want to meditate about that with you.

In Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the kinds of friendship. He points out that there are three kinds of friendship, those based on the useful, those based on the pleasant, and those based on the good. In every case (1156a7-10) “there is a mutual and recognized love, and those who love wish well to each other in that respect in which they love one another.” He goes on to say, however, that those who love another for the sake of the useful and the pleasant are motivated most of all by their own good. They “do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other.”

If we are friends at work because you help me with my job, then my love for you is based on the good you do me. Aristotle points out that such friendships are easily dissolved, if they go no further than utility. If there is nothing more to our friendship, then, when we stop working together, we won’t be friends.

Perfect friendship, that which most of all deserves the name, is, in contrast, the “friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.” (1156b6) True friends, that is, those who are most truly said to be friends, are those who wish well to their friends for their friend’s sake, not only for their own. (1156b8) Such a man, that is, a man who is this kind of friend, because he wishes the good for his friend for his friend’s sake, regards the friend as another self. If we are friends in this way, whether we work together or not, we will continue to spend time together and we will want and work for each other’s good, just because it is good for the other. We will think about what we can do for each other, what will help each of us reach our common goals. We will pray for each other, and we will recommend to each other good books that help us be better people. We will even speak to each other, out of charity, when we see the other developing a bad habit, if it seems necessary, and we will listen to each other, out of charity, when that happens. This kind of friendship has been described in another way: “A true friend is one soul in two bodies.” Clearly, this kind of friendship involves conformity of one friend to the other.

That’s why we are so concerned about the friends our children have. We become like the things we love, so we should be very careful to love good things and good people. This has a wonderful consequence: if we are God’s friends, we will become like Him, that is, conformed to Him, and prepared for heaven.

Friendship with God, then, is another way to ‘shape’ our souls. Developing the right attitude for our tasks was the first way to shape our souls that we discussed, as Niggle did in the hospital, but this is another way. In both ways, one becomes conformed to Christ, and ready for the companionship of heaven.

As Aristotle said, friendship requires some kind of common life. We have to be working for the same things, or loving the same things and striving for them together. Think about your friends and you will see that this is true. You can admire someone you know is good but with whom you have no common life. You wouldn’t say, however, that such a person was your friend. Aristotle said, as I mentioned above, that to be friends you have to ‘eat salt together’, which is a way of saying you have to live together.

Prayer, it seems to me, is a powerful way of living a common life with God. If so, prayer is a way to develop friendship with Him. Become God’s friends through prayer and you will be like Him, willing His good for His sake, and enjoying His company. So, we want to think about how to pray well.

But there is a problem that has to be considered briefly first: living a common life implies equality, not necessarily perfect equality, but some kind of equality. There can be a kind of love between those who are not equals, like that between man and the animals, but not common life. That is why Adam wasn’t satisfied until God brought Eve to him. None of the other animals were his equals. When God brought Eve, Adam said, “This at last is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh....” So if prayer is going to be a way of developing friendship with God and living a common life with him, we have to be in some way God’s equals. That seems presumptuous and a problem.

We are encouraged, however, by Christ’s own words in John 15:15 when He says: "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.”

How can this be? How can we be God’s friends, when that implies equality, and we are men, not gods? It is through grace that we are raised up to share in His divine life. This is not our natural life, but it is our life, nonetheless. In Of Sacraments and Sacrifice Fr. Clifford Howell explains this well. This is a longer passage, but I think it is worth hearing:

“...the obvious point from which to begin is natural life. We are familiar with three forms of it – plant life, animal life, human life....We know that each form of life is limited in its capabilities. Plants cannot do animal things, and animals cannot do human things.

On a beautiful spring morning a thrush may experience such a feeling of well-being that he opens his beak and expresses himself in exquisite song. The daffodils at the foot of his tree may be equally thriving in their own way – but they cannot sing about it. Yet a man who likewise feels that life is particularly good that morning might very well sing –though his song would have words to it because speech is within the power of human nature. Suppose, however, that a thrush which had
strayed into Missouri burst forth into a nostalgic ditty about his “Old Kentucky Home,” then he would not be acting according to his nature. He would be acting according to human nature, which is above his own. Now the Latin word for “above” is super. Hence this imaginary thrush would be acting supernaturally – doing
something supernatural.

Another example. The different forms of life act differently with regard to their food. Plants wait for it to come to them (in the form of soluble salts from the earth). Animals go and get it (whether it be grass in a field or deer in a forest). Man not only procures his food but, when he wants to, he also cooks it. Now if a barren fig tree started wandering round n search of a nice succulent dung-hill, or if a wolf were discovered rigging up a spit on which to cook a newly killed deer, each would be acting supernaturally. The tree would be acting according to animal nature; and the wolf according to human nature.

The only possible explanation for such behavior would be that somehow the tree had become endowed with a share in animal nature, and the wolf with a share in human nature. For each would be doing something for which it does not, by its own nature, possess the requisite powers. It must, therefore, be sharing in that type of life with belongs to a nature above (super) its own – that is supernatural life.

Of course there are not, in fact, any thrushes, fig trees or wolves capable of these astonishing supernatural actions! We can only imagine them, and are powerless to make these creatures of our imagination exist in reality. But that does not apply to God. He can not only imagine anything imaginable, but, if He wants to, He can create it as a reality. So far as we can make out He has not desired to make any plants or animals share in that type of life higher than their own natural life (unless, perhaps, Balaam’s loquacious ass was an instance!)

But [H]e has done it in the case of man! For He has invited man to share in divine happiness. And that is not natural to man at all. The happiness natural to man Is human happiness; divine happiness is what is natural to God. To enjoy it is therefore a divine activity, above human nature. If man is to do that, then he has to act supernaturally; for that he needs supernatural life of the type corresponding to the activity. For a divine activity he would have to have a share in divine life.

And that, best beloved, is precisely what God has given him! Besides his natural life he is given “a created participation in the divine nature” (as theologians call it), and this makes him capable for certain activities which belong properly to God alone and exceed the powers of human nature. In particular, man thereby becomes capable of enjoying God’s perfections – that is, of being happy in the way that God is happy (not in a merely human way). .... And because man has no right whatever to this created participation in the divine nature, and has it only through God’s goodness or graciousness, it goes also by the name of grace.

So, through grace we share in God’s nature, have (in a way) equality with Him so that we can pursue a common life with Him.

Now, the other attribute Aristotle says is necessary for friendship is time, not just one instance of time together, but, he says, friends can’t “admit each other to friendship or be friends till each has been found loveable and been trusted by each.” (1156b26). This means doing things together over a period of time.

When you meet a new friend, you can decide immediately that this person is your kind of person. You can decide that you would like to get to know her better, and spend time with her. But until you do so, you can’t say she is your friend. We should do the same kind of thing with God. Through God’s free gift of grace we do immediately participate in His life, and we are His friends. But to deepen that friendship we need to spend time with Him.

This is where prayer comes in. This is what my time at the monastery made me think more about. Prayer is a way of spending time with God, and thus, is, or can be, an expression of, and an exercise of, friendship. St. Thomas, in his commentary on “The Lord’s Prayer”, says “It establishes friendship with God. Prayer is profitable because it makes us the familiars of God...”. We should pray so as to strengthen and deepen our friendship with God, and thus conform ourselves to Him.

That means we need to know how to pray. The disciples knew that, and they asked Jesus that question, exactly. Or, rather, they said, “Teach us how to pray.” I used to think it was a little strange that when the disciples asked Jesus, who was preeminently their teacher, to teach them HOW to pray, He gave them a prayer to say. After all, I thought to myself, Jesus didn’t want us only to say one prayer, so why did He give one prayer instead of giving the principles of prayer so that we
could apply those principles to many prayers?

St. Thomas explains in his commentary that Jesus actually did do that. He taught us what the principles of prayer are by concretizing those principles in a specific prayer. It’s a mode of teaching Jesus used frequently, as when He taught universal principles through parables.

Since the Our Father is the prayer that Jesus gave when asked to teach us how to pray, we should pay attention to the qualities of the prayer, and that way we will learn what qualities all prayers should have. Jesus was teaching us the principles of prayer, but He showed them to us concretely, in a particular instance, because we often learn better that way. St. Thomas shows that the Our Father excels in the five conditions required in prayer: confidence, rectitude, order, devotion and humility.

Prayer should be confident, says St. Thomas, and we can be most confident in the Lord’s Prayer, because Jesus Himself, who grants our prayers, told us to ask for these things in this way. Thus, looking in some detail at what is contained in the Lord’s Prayer will be helpful to us, as we will know that we can have confidence as we ask for these things even if we do so in other words.

Prayer should also have rectitude, meaning that we should ask God for those things that are good for us. But if we ask for the wrong things out of ignorance, though with a good attitude, God, because He loves us, is not going to give us what we asked for. He will give us something better, which is one reason why it sometimes seems that God has not answered our prayers. Prayer is not magic, where a hurriedly thought out or poorly phrased request leads to dire consequences. ‘Be careful what you wish for!’ Rather, prayer is supplication to a loving Father, Who knows what you need and want and knows what is good for you. Just as we won’t give our children their desires, if what they desire is going to harm them, God won’t give us what we ask for unless it is good for us.

This is how St. Thomas addresses this issue: “Now it is no easy matter to know what we should pray for, since it is difficult to know what we ought to desire. For if it is right to pray for a certain thing, it must be right to desire it. For this reason the Apostle says that ‘we know not what we should pray for as we ought’”. (Rom. 8:26) Then St. Thomas says that “we pray most rightly when we pray for what He taught us to pray for.” Thus it is very worth thinking about what, exactly, we ask for in the Our Father. That way we will know what to ask for in any prayer. So we will consider that in a minute.

Next, we should reflect on order. Every prayer should have order, for desire should be orderly, which means it should be in accordance with right reason, and prayer is an expression of desire, so prayer should also be in accord with right reason. There is more to it than this, and I am going to give a little more detail shortly, but the right order, broadly speaking, is to prefer spiritual goods to worldly goods and heavenly things to earthly things. St. Thomas says that is why the Gospel
says, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt. 6:33) You will notice that the order in the Lord’s prayer is first for heavenly and then for earthly blessings.

Prayer should also be devout, that is, it should have deep religious feeling or, at least, commitment of the will (since one can’t always control one’s feelings). St. Thomas says that the Our Father teaches us something about that, too. He says, “Yet it often happens that devotion grows cool through prayer being too long.
For that reason our Lord warned us against praying at unnecessary length: ‘When you are praying, speak not much.’ (Matt. 6:7).....Hence the brevity of the Lord’s Prayer.” I think that is a cheering thought for busy mothers.

Further, St. Thomas teaches that devotion arises from charity, that is, from love of God above all things, for His own sake, and love of neighbor as oneself. These are both “indicated in the Lord’s prayer. In order to express our love of God we call Him Father, and in order to indicate love of our neighbor we pray for all in general: Our Father....Forgive us our trespasses...” So, again, we have learned something important about prayer in general. It should be short, it should express charity, and should, in that, include all our neighbors.

Lastly, St. Thomas teaches us that prayer should be humble. He recalls to our minds the prayers of the Pharisee and the publican. Then he says that “This same humility is observed in the Lord’s Prayer since true humility consists in not presuming on our own strength, but in trusting to obtain all things from the power of God.” 

So we have learned that our prayers should have the following attributes: we should pray confidently, for the right things, in the right order, with devotion and humility.

Now, looking at the specific petitions in the Our Father, we can learn what those right things are, and what the right order is. First of all, we should desire the glory of God, which is why we start out saying, “Hallowed be thy name.” Remember that charity is loving God above all things, for His own sake. When you love someone you will the good for him (that is what love means, most perfectly) and when we love God, we will the good for Him, which means willing Himself for Himself. So all prayer should be said in charity, and should intend, either explicitly, or implicitly, the glory of God.

Next one should desire from God eternal life, which is why we say, “Thy kingdom come.” The first thing we desire is always the end we want to achieve, and that desire directs all the means to that end. That is why the end is the cause of causes. If I want to make dinner, I have to decide what to have, and then I will know what to get at the store and how long to allow for each item. That is true about every action I take. I want to achieve some end, and my desire for that end determines all the steps I take to achieve it.

Our ultimate end is God, so we aim for Him and direct ourselves to Him as our end. This means that we first will His glory, out of love for Him, and then we should will our enjoyment of His glory, which we will have in the beatific vision in Heaven. That is what we are asking for when we say, “Thy kingdom come," because we are asking to come to the glory of His kingdom.” (II-II, Q. 83, art. 9). Thus, whenever we pray, whatever our other specific petitions are, we should be asking for them in the light of our getting to heaven to be with God.

Then we should pray for the fulfillment of God’s will and His justice. That is why we say, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” When one of my friends got very sick with a brain tumor, our whole community prayed hard for him. There was some concern about whether we should pray for his cure, or simply pray that God’s will be done. A very good priest explained to us that every prayer should have the underlying intention that the thing asked for be should be in accordance with God’s will. He said we should always ask for what we want, as we pray better that way, but we should have in our minds, as well, that we ask for it if it be in accordance with God’s will. Father reminded us of Our Lord’s prayer in the garden, "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt." (Matt. 26:39) Jesus asked for what He wanted, but only if that was God’s will. We need to have that same attitude.

So, thus far, we see that when we pray we should pray in charity, that is, we should ask in our prayer that God be glorified, we should ask that we will achieve eternal life, and that we should be doing God’s will in this prayer.

Now we get to the part I have generally thought of first when I thought about prayer: the necessities of life. In the Our Father we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Interestingly, St. Thomas points out at this juncture that the Our Father follows the order and content of the verse in Matthew that I quoted earlier. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.” “Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” that is what we do when we say ‘Hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come’. Then we say, “and His Justice,” which is what we ask for when we say ‘They will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven’.

The third part of the instruction is “and all these things shall be added unto you.” That is what we ask for when we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” So the Our Father perfectly follows this instruction, and makes clear to us how we should seek God’s kingdom, and His justice and what will be added unto us. It is also good to note, again, that the prayer here includes the intentions of our neighbors, for it says, “Give US this day our daily bread.”

Daily bread can be, and has been, interpreted in many ways. But it certainly does include, as St. Thomas says, “the necessities of life.” This can be the new car our family needs, or the healing of our friend’s cancer, or the exactly right new dress for the upcoming big occasion, as long as the other points I have already men-
tioned are in place. St. Thomas reminds us that “Prayer is efficacious and useful for obtaining whatever we desire: ‘All things whatsoever ye ask, when ye pray, believe that you shall receive.’” (Mark 11:24) So our desires need to be ordered, as we were just saying, but if they are, “ask and you shall receive.”

Of course, nearly everyone has had the experience of asking for something in prayer that he didn’t receive, and that often makes one wonder about the efficacy of prayer. St. Thomas says that prayers are not granted either because the prayer lacks constancy, for we are told ‘we should pray always and never faint’ (Luke 18:1), or, as I mentioned earlier, because we are asking for something that is less conducive to our salvation. Since we know that all our prayers should be ordered to
our salvation, as we were just saying, then, if what we are asking for in particular is not going to help us achieve salvation, we don’t really want it. However, as St. Augustine points out, “Of His bounty the Lord often grants not what we seek, so as to bestow something preferable.” God always hears and answers our prayer. Sometimes what He gives us is not the thing we are explicitly praying for, though, but something even better, the thing we would intend if it had occurred to us.

My experience is that children often get exactly what they ask for, while adults sometimes don’t, but that as one ages he sees that those unanswered prayers were actually answered, just not in the way he expected. One might, for example, pray hard for a specific job, and not get it, but because of being unemployed he can enter another field, one where he is much happier. As I said earlier, prayer is not magic. When we make a petition we know we are asking someone who knows better than we do what we need.

Now, St. Thomas also points out that the Our Father shows us what should be avoided in our lives, in fact it shows us what we should flee from. We pray for God’s help in these things, as well.

We should avoid sin, as it is contrary to eternal life, which we have already asked for. To remove the evil of sin we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Then we ask God to remove temptations, which St. Thomas says, “are opposed to righteousness and good works, since temptations hinder us from performing good works.” So this evil is opposed to the petitions for the fulfillment of God’s will. To remove this evil, we pray, “And lead us not into temptation.” Lastly, we ask God to help us in troubles and trials, which are opposed to our daily bread, those things we need and ask God for. For this reason we say, “But deliver us from evil. Amen.”

Thus, in addition to learning the universal qualities of prayer, namely confidence, rectitude, order, devotion and humility, from the Our Father, we learn what the right order of our prayer is. We need to pray for heavenly things (God’s glory and our salvation) and then earthly things. Among the earthly things we pray first for the things to be achieved, namely God’s will on earth, and our specific needs, and then for help in avoiding the things to be avoided, such as sin, temptations, troubles and trials. We also learned that brevity is a help to devotion.

This is all very useful information for those of us with busy lives. Most of us are like Martha in the Gospel, busy about many things. Keeping the qualities of fruitful prayer in mind can help us focus our prayer, and make our prayer more efficacious. Remembering that prayer is an expression of, and an exercise of, friendship, and that friendship is a way of achieving conformity with one’s friend is also helpful, especially as conformity with Jesus is the goal of our lives, one that, when achieved, makes us ready to take up our new life at the end of this one.

So, let me summarize our meditation thus far. The goal of our lives is to be conformed to Christ so that we can live happily in Eternity with Him. There are at least two ways to achieve that conformity. The first is by doing our jobs well, with the right attitude. That is a good way, and one everyone in this audience has been working on, or she wouldn’t be here. The second is through the explicit and direct friendship with God cultivated by prayer, because in friendship we are conformed to our friends. If God is our friend, then we will be conformed to Him. The way to strengthen our friendship with God is to pray, because prayer is an expression of friendship, a way of spending time with our Friend.

Prayer, rightly done, has the qualities I just mentioned, and a right order. None of this changes the simple fact that when we need help, of any kind, we should turn to God in prayer. What it does is set a context for the prayer, and, I hope, emphasize the fact that prayer is not just or primarily a way of ‘getting things we want’ but rather a way of developing our relationship with God. We may be Martha’s, but we have a Mary mind. For that reason, we want to be nourished in our prayer life. We want to spend fruitful time with God.

For years I have been telling moms that when they have a question about their children, something that they have thought about and discussed with their husbands, but they just haven’t been able to determine what the right answer is, the best thing to do is take up the matter with God at Holy Hour. 

I have never heard a voice, but I have frequently had the experience of going into Holy Hour with a question, telling God about the problem, just as I would to you if we were talking (and I had no secrets), and then listening. As I said, I don’t hear a voice, but I usually find that what was unclear before is now clear, or that something I hadn’t really considered is now in my mind, and it is obviously the best thing to do. 

After my trip to Vienna, and a subsequent conversation with a good priest about my ‘checklist’ mentality regarding prayer, I have taken up a variation on that Holy Hour experience. The priest said, “Laura, you can’t be friends with someone you don’t spend time with,” interestingly echoing Aristotle. He said, “Spend 10 minutes a day with Our Lord in conversation. Talk to Him about your day, and what is on your mind. Talk to Him as you would to any dear friend. Then listen to Him, too.” In that chat one can discuss the ‘necessities of life’, those things that we usually refer to as prayers of petition, as well as thanking Him for the good things in our lives, telling Him we love Him and want to be with Him in Eternity, and apologizing for our offenses.

That was some of the best advice I have ever gotten, and is actually the reason I wanted to talk to you on the subject of prayer. In thinking about prayer, and friendship and reading St. Thomas on the Our Father, I have learned a great deal, and I wanted to share it, too. But what moved me in the first place was a desire to share the idea of a 10 minute daily chat with your best friend, the Person who knows you better than anyone else in the world and loves you more.

There are other ways to develop your friendship with Jesus, activities like reading about Him in Scripture, and ‘discussing’ that with Him, or saying a decade of the Rosary when you are awake at night nursing the baby. I mentioned earlier that I have been able to go to daily Mass and I am so grateful for that. I recommend daily Mass if at all possible for you. All of these are ways to nourish the life of friendship with Jesus, and so they all, in a way, provide food for our souls.

But my basic message here is that though we are busy Marthas in the world, we can cultivate a relationship with Christ like that Mary had. We do this through prayer, by seeing our prayer as an exercise of our friendship with God. Through the instruction of Our Lord on how to pray, and our knowledge of how to cultivate friendship, our prayers won’t be just a check off list, but a transforming experience whereby we are nourished and prepared for Eternal Life.