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World at Prayer blog
Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
Faith Reflection | Hope-2025 | Jubilee of Hope | power of prayer
I was listening to the radio when they announced a contest where a caller might win a thousand dollars. These radio contests happen often, and I have never called in in my whole life. As I was thinking about my track record, I realized it was because I had no hope of winning. Looking back at my life, when there were raffles and drawings, I was never a winner (except once when I won a laminator at a homeschool conference, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one who wanted it). Without hope of winning, there is no reason for us to bother. A thousand dollars, a new laptop — those are pretty impressive. But the hope of eternal life is a much higher reward! We turn to God for our needs because we hope in a God who is not only good but trustworthy; a God who wants to give us good things for our happiness. Unfortunately, the Devil’s whole goal in life is to make us doubt God’s goodness and not believe that He is trustworthy. Without hope in these two things, we don’t bother “running the race,” as St. Paul puts it in Philippians 3:14.
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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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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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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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Faith Reflection | Hope-2025 | Jubilee of Hope | power of prayer
As a Catholic daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend, I have had many moments in my life where Hope is what held me together; dragging Faith and Charity along with her into the future with great expectations and keeping her eyes set upon the One Who was surprised at this little girl, Hope, in me.
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Faith Reflection | Hope-2025 | Jubilee of Hope | power of prayer
When Pope Francis declared this to be the Jubilee Year of Hope, I was struck by the different connotations the word has. In our family, “Hope” is my beautiful niece, full of determination and confidence and grace and love. We often “hope” for a good grade, an athletic win, a part in a play. The theological virtue of hope, though, is more nuanced. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines hope as our “desire [for] the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (Section 1817). When I think about my own journey toward true hope, I go back to college and the first time I noticed my husband’s seizure activity. We were on our way to study at a local greasy diner, and as I chattered away at him about everything and nothing, his right arm flew up over his head and then his hand rested back on the steering wheel. Weird.
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