Faith Filled Friday: The Four Levels of Prayer

I am not speaking about the four types of prayer: adoration, petition, intercession, thanksgiving. 

I am speaking about the levels of prayer. 

1.      Vocal Prayer

2.      Affective Prayer

3.      Simple Union

4.      Close Intimate.

 

The terms have been called by different names.  These are the terms I wish to use.  Let’s understand them.  Some have more gradations of levels, but they all seem to reduce to these four.

Vocal prayer is somewhat misnamed.  Vocal prayer are formulated prayers that are fixed and shared.  The Our Father is a vocal prayer.  Vocal prayer has nothing to do with whether one articulates it through speech.  One can articulate it through speech or run it in one’s head silently. 

Affective prayer is a prayer one spontaneously says.  It is usually generated on the spot and is an expression of the heart, of the moment, and of one’s interior disposition.  It can be a complex set of paragraphs, fragments of speech, or disjointed thoughts. 

Simple union is a level of prayer that requires no articulation.  It is sort of living interaction with God without the need to say anything.  The prayer is the living out of life in a sort of dance with the other. 

Close intimate prayer is not just a dance with God but a living in union with God.  What you express is God’s expression and what God expresses comes through you.

Pope St. John Paul I, Albino Luciani, the Holy Father who was pope for only a month, oftentimes referred to as “the smiling pope,” created visual examples of all four levels of prayer.  These are great examples.  [By the way, I got this from an article, “ Combat For Contemplative Life: Return to the Sources” by Sister Gabriela of the Incarnation, O.C.D. at the Where Peter Is website.  She cites the source: Albino Luciani, Giovanni Paolo I, “Opera Omnia.” Vol IX, pp. 333-4, Edizioni messaggero padova, 1989.]

The Father is celebrating his name day: they have organized a little party at home. The moment arrives: he already knows what they have planned, and he says: ‘Now let’s see what they do for me!’ First comes the youngest of the children: they have taught him a poem that he has memorized. ‘Bravo!’ says the Father, ‘I’m so pleased, you’ve done yourself proud, thank you, my boy.’ He recited it from memory.

The little one leaves, and the second son steps forward; he is already in middle school and he disdains the thought of learning something by heart; he has prepared a polished little speech, his own stuff, out of his own thoughts. Maybe it’s short, for he gets bogged down in the oratory. ‘I would never have believed,’ says his father, ‘that you were so good at making speeches!” And his father is delighted: look at those beautiful thoughts! Then he also steps aside…it wasn’t a masterpiece, but still….

Third, the young lady, the daughter. She has simply prepared a bunch of red carnations. She says nothing. She doesn’t say a word in front of her Father, not a single word: but she’s moved, she blushes so much that it’s hard to say which are redder, she or the carnations. And her father says to her: ‘It’s easy to see that you love me, you are so rosy and so deeply moved’. But never a word. However he appreciates the flowers, especially because he sees her so moved and so full of affection.

Then there is the mother, his bride. She doesn’t give anything. She looks at her husband and he looks at her: just a glance. They know so many things. That look evokes a whole past, a whole lifetime. The good, the bad, the joys, the sorrows of the family. There is nothing else. These are the four types of prayer.

What is interesting is the progression.  There is a difference in relationship the further one goes with the four level, so that the littlest with vocal prayer is the less mature while the wife's simple glance is the most mature.

Of course that doesn’t mean that if one is at the full intimate level one doesn’t perform the other three.  The further along one is in one’s prayer life, one has all tools available for use.