This week, I’m featuring short excerpts from my book, A Well-Built Faith, focusing on the 4 pillars of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Here’s a brief look at the fourth pillar: Prayer.
A survey conducted years ago asked people in successful marriages to identify the top ten qualities of a healthy marriage. One might think that sex, given all the attention it is given in our culture, would have been the number one quality. Not so. What was number one? Communication! Relationships last when people communicate with one another.
Prayer is the way we communicate with God. Communication, of course, is a two-way street: speaking and listening. Many of us were taught that prayer is talking to God. This is only part of the dynamic of prayer. If prayer were understood as simply talking to God than Saint Paul’s insistence that we should pray always would mean that we should be talking incessantly to God. Poor God! Imagine having to listen to someone else speak incessantly! Fortunately, communication is a two-way street that involves listening. Without listening, we are missing the voice of God. Later on in this book, we’ll explore how God speaks to us and what it means to hear God’s voice. For now, it is enough to know that prayer is the fourth pillar of our Catholic faith and that, without prayer, we run the risk of collapsing like a card table with only three legs.
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