What Did Jesus Pray?

by Fred Vilbig

I want to consider for a moment something that I think is very interesting: Jesus prayed. Jesus prayed throughout His ministry. He would get up early in the morning and go pray. (Mark 1:35, Luke 5:16.) Jesus prayed before major events such as the miracles of the loaves and the raising of the dead. (Mark 6:46, John 11:41-42.) He prayed all night before choosing the apostles. (Luke 6:12-13.) In addition, Jesus thought that prayer was so important that He took the time to teach his disciples how to pray, and He gave us the Our Father. The Evangelists thought this was important enough to mention in the Gospels.

But this also raises a question: what did Jesus pray? The only thing that the Gospels say is that Jesus went off alone to pray, but it doesn’t really tell us anything more. I am sure that he was in deep contemplative prayer being fully human. I don’t know how accessible that would be to us. But I think there is another possibility.

When Jesus was hanging on the Cross, he cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” That troubled me for a long time. How could God the Father have forsaken His Son, Jesus, with whom he was united in his very substance? That made no sense to me. Our God is One and Three, but He is still One. How could the Son be separated from the Father?

The Spiral of Silence

The PX90 summer book club is reading "Forming Intentional Disciples: The Path to Knowing and Following Jesus" by Sherry Weddell.  We are only through the first few chapters so far but I have found the book and material to be intriguing.  One of the concepts Sherry introduced to me is the Spiral of Silence.  As Sherry puts it, 
  
"The Spiral of Silence is a well-known communication theory originally proposed by political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. In her research, Noelle-Neumann found that people are less likely to voice an opinion on a topic if they believe they are in the minority, because most people fear isolation from the majority. One of the crucial points of the Spiral of Silence theory is that people are constantly observing the behaviors of those around them, to see which behaviors gain approval and which receive disapproval from the majority."

If you are a visual person, maybe the illustration below will help.  In it we see that both the mass media and interpersonal interactions play a large role in the spiral behavior.

 

 In "Forming Intentional Disciples" the author sees this phenomena as one of the major factors explaining why in our society today talking about one's faith is considered by many  - even those who profess to be people of faith and attend mass regularly -to be taboo.  I agree with her, and have experienced this feeling myself many times when I have failed to bring faith into a conversation stemming from the fear of the opinions of others.    

Unless you are living under a rock, with no TV or internet access and have no friends or children, you are being confronted daily with opinions, opportunities and situations where the truths of the Catholic faith are being called into question and in many cases outright attacked.  This blog has highlighted a few of these everyday situations, like here and here.  The Spiral of Silence is in effect at these times, as we mentally - and most likely sub-consciously - weigh our options in how to respond.

My prayer today is that God provides us the grace to bring our response out of the subconscious and to provide the strength and courage to break the silence...

What's up with the prenupt?

Amazing what God presents in experiences and nature ….

In mid-March over two years ago, seven former students converged on St. Louis for a friend’s wedding. All seven, two females, five males graduated from the same high school eight years earlier and had dropped in to visit me. All worked professional careers. Three of the males and one female were already married while Rick and Lindsay were engaged separately to marry sometime during the next year. I changed the names to protect the rascals of whom I write. Employed with a leading Denver firm, Rick, a lawyer from a prestigious university had drafted a prenuptial agreement, a legal contract entered into prior to marriage commonly including provisions for division of property and spousal support in the event of divorce or breakup of marriage. 

“What’s up with the prenupt?” Lindsay, an engaged first year medical resident questioned her classmate’s motive.