For the sake of keeping the peace amongst my readers here on my blog, I don’t often write about religion. I figure there is more than enough divide in the world right now without adding religion into the mix, although sometimes I do yearn to write more about faith and religion.
I am a practicing Catholic, for context, and I attend church weekly with my mom. My mom is rather cute in the sense that she brings a solid amount of her own prayer materials with her to mass to reference, and on one of her notes is a quote from our priest from one of his sermons in which he asked the rather significant question, “How do you love?”
Our priest is a wise man, and his wisdom is often palpable in his sermons. His question about how we love relates to another question he posed a few weeks later – “How do you pray?”
I will be fully transparent and admit that, at times, I am not as attentive to his sermons as I should be. But the one in which he asked about how we pray kept my attention for its entirety, because he, in a sense, called out a whole bunch of us who pray regularly. He asked the congregation how present we are when we pray, and it positively floored me, because I almost feel as though my own daily prayers have become more of a routine and obligation than a pleasure, and an opportunity to be present with God.
In my 30 years of attending mass, I have never heard a priest make mention of how easy it is to disassociate while praying. Ever since I heard this sermon, I’ve been trying to be more attentive and genuine while praying, and for anyone who is religious, I think this is a much-needed reminder for a lot of us.
Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash
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