Training in prayer

Now a Christian needs not only to know, but to pray. Then room must be made in the program for teaching the budding lay saint how to pray in a way that will be most helpful for him.

Obviously, if the liturgy is the "people's work," then the students would be expected to attend Mass--I would think together--every day. Whether this would be the college's regular mass for the students, or whether there would be a special one for them, I don't have any definite idea on. Perhaps the latter, so that the homily could be more definitely directed and at a higher Theological level than the chats which are needed for the usual congregation.

The idea here is not to create a little Religious congregation, but that while the students are in training, help and the reinforcement of doing what others are doing while they are doing it is necessary. You have to have someone hold you while you take your first steps; then after you've learned to walk, you don't need the hands ready to steady you when you totter.

So yes, for the trainees there should be regulations and expectations for them, so that afterwards they can carry on on their own. When forming habits, you need all the help you can get; once they are formed (and five years could do the job), the habit itself is a help, and you don't need external prodding. We are fallen, remember, no matter how fervent we are.

I would also think that personal prayer, private meditation, would also be required: say a half hour every day. I am not talking about "transcendental meditation," however great its value, but Christian mental prayer, but of a lay sort. Thinking about the life of Jesus, to be sure; but also things like concentrating on individual daily actions and pondering how they can be Christianized by taking a new attitude toward them.

For instance, spend a half hour in the presence of your Master considering what the difference is in getting up in a Christian way as opposed to just getting up. What is getting up in the morning? What are you doing? How can it be most fully what it really is? How can God's infinite respect for sleep and waking make it more itself? Or consider washing your face. How do you Christianly wash your face?

All of this sounds silly when you say it; a half hour spent prayerfully pondering washing your face? But it doesn't follow that it is meaningless, and, as St. Thérèse of Lisieux showed, this transformation of little things amounts to a transformation of everything, because it transforms your whole outlook on anything--which is what Christianity's metanoia is.

I would like to see the person who would like to enter this program make a full Ignatian month-long retreat, alone, with just the spiritual director seeing him. After all, the Ignatian retreat is concerned with what your life is to be, seeing it in the light of the Master. I have some problems with Ignatius's philosophy (in the First Week especially), and I think the content of the meditations would have to be adapted from their rather propagandistic orientation toward an active Religious life into a more neutral direction. But the idea is sound and is an excellent start on a new outlook--and it certainly teaches you how to meditate.

There should, I think, be eight-day retreats every year of the five after this, where a person could rethink his goals in life in the light of what he learned that year. I think three days is too little to get anything really profound done; and we are talking about really profound training. Should retreats continue after graduation? I don't know, and I think that is up to the graduate himself. The layman is on his own.