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World at Prayer blog
Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
Celebrating family life | Strengthening family unity
We all understand the profound ache of a parent’s heart when a child strays from faith. Today, Scripture meets us in that painful wilderness where the Israelites, just freed from slavery, quickly doubted God's care (Exodus 16). Their story mirrors our own: When prayers seem unanswered, when Mass pews empty, when our children exchange truth for the world’s fleeting promises—how do we keep believing?
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Faith Reflection | Hope-2025 | Jubilee of Hope | power of prayer
The psalms are deeply emotional. Read the Psalms and you will find joy, gratitude, sorrow, and despair. You will find guilt and regret. You will find resentment and frustration. You will find peace and contentment. The psalms are replete with human cries to God that span the spectrum of emotions. Praying the Liturgy of the Hours Became My Anchor Several years ago, I was reintroduced to the Psalms through praying the Liturgy of the Hours. When I began praying the hours, specifically morning and evening prayer, I was grieving a tragic loss. Routine prayer became the anchor of my days. My emotions were all over the place and were frankly unpredictable. Some days I felt okay, some days I felt numb, and some days I felt unstable and could hardly recognize myself. I would feel profound sadness one moment and then a little while later, a rush of overwhelming gratitude. I would feel cheerful and social, and then suddenly want to run and hide from the whole world.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
Sometimes our good experiences are the expected outcome of what we’ve been working for, the natural unfolding of our usual role. But sometimes they represent a pretty radical shift in our life’s trajectory, a startling revelation to our very self-understanding. A person in college or the working world feels an unexpected call to consider a religious vocation. A young man and a young woman who have been friends for a long time suddenly sense that perhaps there’s something more to their relationship. A newlywed couple, both focused until now on succeeding in their professional careers, discern that, unlike many of their friends and peers, they desire to have children early in their marriage.
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Faith Reflection | Hope-2025 | Jubilee of Hope | power of prayer
Prayer is such a personal experience and different for everyone. We may be saying the same prayers out loud, but the words are being absorbed into our hearts and minds in different ways. Even as individuals, the same prayer or Bible passage can hit us in completely different ways depending on the season of life we are in or whatever situation we are working through. The prayer that brings me hope is the Seven Sorrows of Mary. Mary suffered so much over the course of her life. Because of her experiences, we can be assured that we have a Heavenly Mother who understands our own painful life circumstances and who longs to pour consolation into our hurting hearts. Learning about the Seven Sorrows of Mary was a grace for me when our daughter, Therese, was born with a fatal genetic disorder and passed away at sixteen days old 27 years ago. Mary’s Seven Sorrows gave me a way to connect some of the most sorrowful moments of my life during Therese’s 16-day journey to each of her own sorrows. In the time of some of my deepest grief, Mary’s experiences helped me to feel understood and less alone in my pain.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
How much do we trust God in adversity? I guess it all depends. Moses’ people trusted God when given the chance to flee slavery in Egypt, but then, when Pharaoh changed his mind and sent his whole army after them, they doubted God. Their fear and frustration were vented upon Moses as they sarcastically asked, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt…it’s far better to be slaves of the Egyptians than to die in the desert.” Two points came to mind. The first was, do we ever find ourselves making the calculations that the Jewish people did when faced with impending loss? Do we rationalize and settle for something wrong to keep afloat or not to upset the apple cart of life and family?
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Faith Reflection | Hope-2025 | Jubilee of Hope | power of prayer
When I was growing up, I attended our local Catholic elementary school. During music class, Sister Cecilia taught us to sing this prayer, which she called the “Day by Day” prayer: Day by day, o dear Lord Three things I pray! To see you more clearly, Love you more dearly, Follow you more nearly, Day by day. It wasn’t until I was quite a bit older that I learned the melody we sang this song to is from the musical Godspell, first performed in 1970. It’s a catchy tune and certainly helped us to learn and remember this prayer. But I did a little research and discovered that this prayer predates the '70s by a lot — by several hundred years, in fact. It is attributed to Richard of Chichester, an English bishop and saint who lived in the early 13th century. It comes down to us today because it was transcribed from Latin by Saint Richard’s confessor and later published in the Acta Sanctorum, an early encyclopedia-like text on the lives of the saints. The prayer, in just a few short lines, expresses so well the reason for our hope: to be conformed to Jesus in our minds, in our hearts, and in our souls, seen in our actions, little by little, day by day.
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