Guild of St. Peter ad Vincula

The Guild of St. Peter ad Vincula

What do we think prayer is?   Many of us limit the concept of prayer to the recitation of familiar words like the Our Father, the Hail Mary or Act of Contrition.  For others, it is a mental exercise in which we think about a mystery of God or an event in Christ’s life.  In the Rosary, we make use of both these types of prayer.  There is a third type of prayer in which we simply communicate our thoughts with God as to a familiar friend, telling him in our own words about our hopes and fears, our joys, sorrows, and of course, our needs.  Deeper yet is the act of mystic contemplation, something which is a special gift experienced by those specially chosen by God to rise to this level of spirituality.

We’ll find it helpful to divide prayer into four different kinds of act.  To make it even more helpful, we can use the abbreviation A.C.T.S. to remember what the acts are.  The four letters A.C.T.S. stand for the four types of prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.

The most exalted type of prayer is the first.  A is for Adoration, and an act of adoration is the best prayer we can offer to God.  This prayer has God as its direct and only object, and is entirely devoid of self-consideration.  The Glory Be is a short but excellent form of adoration, as is the Sanctus at Mass.

C is for Confession.  By this is meant not just the sacrament of Penance, but any prayer that is offered out of sorrow for our sins.  It is a prayer made with humility and with regret for having offended God.  The Act of Contrition and the Confiteor at Mass are good examples of this type of prayer, but any penitential thought, word or deed are similarly prayerful acts of confession.

T stands for Thanksgiving, and is a type of prayer we often forget until Thanksgiving Day rolls round once a year and reminds us to say thank you to God for all the good things he gives us.  When we think how we would have absolutely nothing without God, not air, food, shelter, family and loved ones, not even our own existence, it’s rather a shame that we spend so little time saying thank you.  We need to be grateful children and say our acts of thanksgiving far more often.  Try including the Grace after Meals for starters.

S for Supplication is the prayer we say the most often.  Why?  Because we always seem to be in need of something.  Even if there’s nothing we actually need, we still want stuff.  We ourselves are meant to be the beneficiary of our prayer, and yet, God is happy to answer our requests, especially when it is for the greater good of our soul.

It’s a good exercise when we pray to be aware what type of prayer we are offering.  As we open the season of Shrovetide today, let’s focus on turning more of our prayers to the confession to God of our sins, developing a heartfelt sorrow for having offended him.  By doing so, we’re preparing our souls for the harder task of doing some real penance when Ash Wednesday arrives and Lent beings in earnest.  Christmas is over, and our Sunday joyful mysteries have turned into the sorrowful.  These transitions are not merely things to observe—our spiritual life should follow these changes throughout the liturgical year.  The liturgy is not some kind of show that is observed like a movie on TV, passively watching as we eat our popcorn.  We need to actively live the liturgy, and this we can achieve by being conscious of these four A.C.T.S. of prayer and “acting” on them.