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A Summary of St. Dominic’s Prayer

The Nine Ways of Prayer of St. Dominic presume a connection between the body and the soul, devotion and prayer. Each of the ways speaks to the importance of what is called “vocal” prayer. Such prayer goes beyond words that are said out loud. Bodily though it is, such prayer reaches for that true and total spiritual worship advocated by St. Paul in Romans 12:1-2.  It takes up gestures of the body which move the soul with devotion so that the grace filled and Holy Spirit imbued soul might move the body in true worship to make Christ-like sacrifices of love:

– The bowing of one’s head and heart with humility at the beginning of prayer before the crucifix, at the altar, in the Name of the Trinity;
– The throwing down and prostrating of one’s whole body with tears of compunction for the sins of others when one can find no more tears for his own;
– The welcoming of all the physical difficulties and the patience endurance of all kinds of bodily discomforts during prayer as part of prayer itself, as a way of offering one’s body to God in praise;
– The fixating of one’s gaze on Christ crucified while kneeling and standing with bold petitions filled with confidence in the indescribable goodness of God and sober acceptance of one’s own weakness;
– The raising of one’s hands to heaven with eyes wide open in the ancient orans of the first Christians;
– The stretching out of one’s arms cruciform with a cry for help in heartbreaking situations;
– The standing strong with hands folded in prayer like an arrow shot into the heart of God;
– The sitting in holy reading and contemplation – that ancient practice of lectio divina; and
– The frequent quest for solitude in which one resists fantasies and evil thoughts like flies and prepares for spiritual battle against diabolical malice by the sign of the Cross.

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The Rosary: Pathway of Mercy

Mercy or misericors, St. Thomas explains, is miserum cor, to have heartache over the plight of another as if it were one’s own (ST I.21.3).  When we allow our hearts to be pierced by the plight of another in this way, we are moved to act, to do something to address the sorrow.  When it comes to the inner life of God, St. Thomas observes that God perfectly effects mercy – that is, although He does not suffer in Himself, He communicates his perfect loving goodness to address the deep sorrows suffered by in the creatures He has made.  Because He is infinite and we are finite, our misery, the intense absence of love in our hearts which is both the cause and fruit of evil in our lives, is circumscribed by inexhaustible frontiers infinite Love.

You complain that you do not see this love, that the pain is to great?  This is why the Word became flesh – by being born as one of us God Himself blazed a trail from the glorious heights of his eternal unbounded love down into the dark labyrinthine passages of our broken hearts.   He made his Cross the point where the immensity sorrow inflicting the human heart is kissed by the greater immensity of God’s love. All we must do is look for this threshold in faith and ask God to help us cross it.  Here we will see the infinite love of God.

Those who glimpse this love start on a pilgrimage.  Repenting of the ways they have hurt others and themselves, they discover a life of ever deeper personal conversion.  It is a journey of forgiveness in which they submit to the Holy Spirit the wounds that others have done to them so that they might learn compassion and intercession.  It is a journey where they allow their hearts to be pierced by the plight of others just as God allowed himself to be pierced by our plight on the Cross.  In this miserum cor we discover the wisdom of God to know what to do in the moment and the power of God to act even when we feel we are at a loss and powerless ourselves.

This pathway of mercy is the journey out of the prison of our own big fat ego and all forms of self-occupation.  It is also a journey into the vast horizons of the heart of Christ Jesus from which flows the very wisdom, love and goodness of God.  The Risen Lord is Christ Crucified in whom we behold the foolishness of God bringing to shame our wisdom and the powerlessness of God overcoming the power of sin.

To help us make this journey, our great patrimony proposes that we fill our imagination by pondering the life of Christ and seeing the connections between his life and ours.  One of the tools which helps us do this is the Rosary – that ancient prayer where we ponder all the mysteries of Christ’s mercy in prayerful awareness of his Mother, Mary whose soul always magnifies the Lord.  As St. Bernard says in the Office of Readings today:

He lay in a manger and rested on a virgin’s breast, preached on a mountain, and spent the night in prayer.  He hung on a cross, grew pale in death, and roamed free among the dead and ruled over those in hell.  He rose again on the third day, and showed the apostles the wounds of the nails, the signs of victory; and finally in their presence he ascended to the sanctuary of heaven.  How can we not contemplate this story in truth, piety and holiness?  Whatever of all this I consider, it is God I am considering; in all this he is my God.  I have said it is wise to meditate on these truth, and I have thought it right to recall the abundant sweetness, given by the fruits of this priestly root; and Mary, drawing abundantly from heaven has caused this sweetness to overflow for us.

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St. Dominic and the Basilica of the Holy Trinity

Today on the Feast of St. Dominic, I went to the Basilica of the Holy Trinity.  Dominicans came to Krakow under the leadership of St. Hyacinth.  He had traveled with his bishop to Rome in the hopes of meeting St. Dominic and convincing him that Poland needed preachers.  Dominic invited him to join his newly formed order and sent him to head the mission in Poland himself.  Dominicans have been ministering at the Basilica ever since.

One of the biggest problems is that there are never enough good preachers.  The Lord relies on preachers to spread our faith.  Yet oftentimes those who try to preach the Gospel fall short of their task.  Noticing such failures could be discouraging.  It can also be a moment of grace, a moment to hear the Lord’s invitation for oneself.  The truth is – everyone to whom the Gospel has been entrusted has a responsibility to witness, to share the faith.  When we possess the truth, it sets us free – free to act, to live life to the full.  On this point, the Christian faith is not passive.  It demands our effort.  The truth must be lived.  This is what the Lord invited St. Hyacinth to through St. Dominic — and the Church of the Holy Trinity is fruit of St. Hyacinth’s response to this invitation.

St. Augustine opens his Confessions with questioning how we are to praise God if we do not know Him.  He understands that our deepest happiness, the place where are hearts most rest, is in worshiping the Lord.  But how do we know who the Lord is so that we might worship Him the right way?  St. Augustine answers his own question.  It is through the words of a preacher.  What an awesome responsibility preaching the Gospel is!  What courage it takes!  Yet the Lord has entrusted this great work to us despite the weakness of our intellects and our inability to fully express the magnitude of the gift He has won for us on the Cross.  Thank God there are those who love us enough, who are courageous enough, to spend their lives in study and preaching – because of them we have access to what is most important for the human spirit, the gift of the Gospel of Christ.  Thank God for St. Dominic and all the preachers whose yes to the Lord never became a no, who by God’s grace and perseverance never compromised in the task entrusted to their care.

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St. Dominic and Praying Cruciform

The ancient Dominicans describe seeing their founder standing upright, with his hands and arms completely stretched out, extended like a cross.  This cruciform posture of prayer was not uncommon among the saints.  There are similar descriptions of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Francis Xavier at prayer.  It seems to be a posture of intercession which imitates the prayer of Christ on the Cross.  The psalms describe holding one’s hands outstretched in intercession and connect this gesture with the soul’s thirst for God (Psalm 143:6).  Elijah also prayed in this way and worked great miracles (1 Kings 17:21).  In Dominic’s case, this form of prayer was reserved for special occasions, those moments when he was particularly prompted by the Holy Spirit to reverently ask for a great miracle, like restoring someone back to life.

There are times in our lives when we feel moved to pray for a miracle.  Sometimes, miracles happen.  When such prayers are granted, a profound joy and awe comes over everyone involved.  It is as if our thirst for God, to be reassured that He is at work among us, matches his thirst for us, his desire that we have confidence in Him.

We tend to think of miracles as events that go against the natural flow of things.  But these Divine works are actually special manifestations of God’s loving power, the One by whose hand the whole world is held together.  Because this power is hidden, we have a tendency to doubt it, especially in the face of great evil.  That is why one of the hardest things to profess in the Creed is the very first article, that God is almighty.   It is because the Lord knows how we struggle to hope in the face of calamity that He will sometimes allow a little glimpse that He is still there – as is the case when someone defies the odds and recovers after mortal injury or else is discovered to be cancer free even if previous tests showed this impossible.

The reason why the early Dominicans described this kind of prayer was because they saw St. Dominic as a model for reverent people who sometimes are also moved to pray for miracles.  They believed that this was how the great prophets prayed, how the psalms teach us to pray, and how Christ prayed from the Cross.  So when those we most love are struggling for hope in the face of horrific tribulation, the example of this great preacher suggests humbling ourselves and reverently asking the Lord for what seems to be impossible, and then to hope in God who alone can satisfy the deepest yearnings of the human heart.

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St. Dominic and Standing in Prayer

One reader who has been following these posts on St. Dominic’s Nine Ways of Prayer raised an important concern about the habitual nature of bodily posture in prayer.  It is true that this kind of prayer inclines toward the habitual – as it should.  We have all kinds of bad bodily habits – the habit of prayer for the body has something to commend itself in this regard.  The problem is when our bodily gestures become mindless and empty.  A mindless sign of the cross or genuflection when we walk into Church does not help our faith or build up the body of Christ or give glory to God.  But this also happens with our words as well.  The problem is not with the gestures or the words, but with the lack of heart, the lack of attention to the Lord.  The only safeguard is a deeper devotion to Jesus Christ, a devotion that grows as our loving knowledge of Him increases.  This is why contemplation is a key to the Nine Ways – beholding the Lord in faith keeps that devotion alive that makes our bodily movements in prayer a true act of worship.

Standing in deep contemplation is one of the ways St. Dominic battled the human tendency to be mindless in prayer.   It was a posture of deep engagement with the Word of God.  It is not that he would actually have a Bible in hand.  Instead, he held his hands as if a Bible were there and would recite to himself from memory passages of the Holy Scriptures.  He was fully engaging the texts that he knew by heart.  It was an intense conversation with God.  It is this kind of conversation that saves our gestures, our posture, from being meaningless.  Such conversation is profoundly open to contemplation – a listening with our spiritual ears, a seeing with the eyes of the heart.  It is also the posture of someone ready to act on what he has heard.

Today in our liturgy, at Mass, when the Gospel is read, we stand.  Standing carries the idea of “taking a stand.”  We stand at the proclamation of the Gospel because when the Gospel is read in the Liturgy, Christ is present to us in a powerful way, teaching us here and now in mystery just as He taught his disciples in history.  Standing is our total response to his teaching, and to his person.  We stand in solidarity with Him.  We stand to honor Him.   On his words, we stake our lives, our honor, all that is of any value to us in this life.  We also stand to listen to Him. We stand taking up our Cross to follow him.  This too his how Dominic stood – in his holy conversation with the One whom he loved and who loved Him even more.

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St. Dominic’s Fourth Way of Prayer – genuflecting

When we walk into our local parish, we see the tabernacle and a candle lit next to it, and without thinking, we go down on one knee, pop back up and go to our pew.  We know, somewhere in the back of our minds, we are suppose to be acknowledging the loving presence of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.  In all likelihood, we completely forget that this bodily action is meant to be a prayer.

Yet for St. Dominic, this was a form of prayer he would repeat over and over for hours before the crucifix.  This act of humility and reverence gave him confidence in God’s mercy.  He would even genuflect to intercede for others.  His witness reminds us that what we do with our bodies in prayer is suppose to accompany a movement of heart.  In the case of a genuflection, we are expressing a movement of reverent humility that gives us confidence before God.

When the fiery Spaniard genuflected up and down into the night – probably on both knees – he would recite the psalms. This probably helped him maintain the right disposition before the Lord.  This way his actions were never empty external rituals, but profound expressions of the spiritual movement of his heart.

The psalms train our heart to be honest – so that our humility before God goes beyond a mere show.  They help us see how passionate our prayer before the Lord is supposed to be.   Urgent, expectant, even demanding – psalms are filled with an array of emotions.  There is nothing in the heart which cannot be the stuff of prayer.

The founder of a new community, entrusted with so many responsibilities, would even give the Lord his anxieties over those entrusted to his care.  He expected the Lord to answer him – so his repeated genuflections expressed a certain kind of holy insistence, like his own life depended on God hearing him.  To this end, the early brothers sometimes over heard him during his genuflections call out the opening verse of Psalm 28, “If you stay silent, I shall be like those who go down into the grave.”

Known as the “Preacher of Grace,” he would get so caught up in praying like this, its seemed like he was no longer aware of his surroundings.  Probably more to the point, he became aware of surroundings that our eyes normally do not see.  Holy desires were inflamed in him.  

What a repudiation of the clinically dry and socially acceptable kind of praying we do today!  The prayer of the saints is always passionate, always a movement out of self and into God.  Such prayer overflows into the lives of others and covers the whole world.  It is this kind of intensity of heart we were meant to have when we come into the the Lord’s presence —  the very reason too we genuflect.

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St. Dominic’s Nine Ways of Prayer – mortification

Of Dominic’s ways of prayer, the section on physical asceticism is described with succinct discretion. In our aggressive and violent culture, great discretion is called for in discussing this for us too. People sometimes read about this kind of prayer and get turned off altogether or else they engage in very self-destructive behavior. So, I hope the reader will forgive the length of this post this time.

It is true that many of the saints sometimes engaged in self-destructive behavior when they were beginning the spiritual life. Part of what they were dealing with was their own broken instinct of self-preservation, an affliction common to all humanity. Self-preservation is sewn into human nature so that we can protect ourselves from legitimate danger. But the saints well understood that this instinct sometimes inclines us away from things that put this life at risk even when our eternal life is on the line. So, they acted against this propensity – sometimes in excess. In most cases, we can find witnesses or their personal writings where they repented and expressed regret for their actions. They came to see that physical asceticism must always be ordered to human maturity.

Indeed, the Fathers of the Church understood that the glory of God is man fully alive. Human maturity, the fullness of life, is realized when we are free to enter into communion with one another and God. It is to this end that the instinct of self-preservation must be ordered or it will continually cause problems for the spiritual life.

It is from the context the this particular practice of St. Dominic should be considered. Witnesses recalled that St. Dominic would beat himself with a chain while praying Psalm 17 (18) — a psalm of deliverance from death and war against the enemies of God. This austere practice was meant to be an expression of compunction.

In other words, while praying for deliverance with his lips, St. Dominic was also acknowledging that he was responsible for the terrible plight he was in and, further, he was somehow responsible for the terrible plight others were suffering. The context of this prayer was war. His body was involved in spiritual violence. The discipline he took on expressed an interior conflict. This extreme form of petition addressed the inclination to forget things that the “self,” the big fat ego, would rather avoid. He wanted to keep in mind his responsibility for his own sin and for the evil suffered by others – because it is by accepting the truth that God can begin to act.

When we are not mindful of the consequences of our own actions or lack of action, we lack the humility, the truthfulness of heart that God searches for in us as He hears our prayers. Without this truthfulness, even our natural instinct for self-preservation can become self-destructive – like when we are callous towards someone who has hurt us, or we have hurt, because on some level we reckon it too painful to deal with them in any other way. Insofar as these hidden motives are driving us, we are not free to love, to follow the prompting of God to move beyond “self.” The tradition sees the need to reorder our instinct for self-preservation in Christ’s teaching: “Whosoever wants to preserve his life will lose it. (Matt. 16:25)”

Is there another way to such truthfulness – the only kind of truthfulness that can heal our instinct for self-preservation, ordering it to eternal life? Therese of Lisieux, our newest doctor of the Church, did not think she could take up the discipline with the same heroic resolve of the great saints. But she wanted to be a saint. She remembered during a pilgrimage to Rome how instead of climbing stairs she took an elevator – and how much easier the elevator was. She believed that the Church needed to develop a spiritual elevator so that people like herselve could more easily become saints. This is what she proposes in her Little Way.

Rather than the physical mortification saints embraced in the past, she advocated interior asceticism. This practice involved among other things acting against our instinct for self-preservation in social situations. Accordingly, when she was misunderstood or falsely accused, instead of mounting her defense or lashing out in righteous indignation, she would offer the situation to God and thank Him that she was deemed worthy to be treated like Christ – then smile or at least silently walk away. In other words, instead of a physical discipline, she used the effort to love her persecutors to be her mortification.

In doing so, she recaptured an important biblical principle often lost on those who are overly concerned with exterior practices: following Christ involves a radical renunciation of the evil in my own heart, a mortification of every impulse which is not for the glory of God. As St. Paul says – the old man needs to be put to death. There is a constant pull to our former way of life, to follow the sinful patterns of life of our ancestors, a way of life that frantically grasps at preservation of one’s self. Instead of going back to the past- Christ challenges us to imitate Him.

Renouncing the tendency to always preserve and promote oneself is what it means to pick up our Cross and follow the Lord. The suffering that must be endured until this renunciation is complete is part of the price of discipleship. This is essential to the interiorization of morality we see in Matthew 5. It speaks to a transformation of the inner man – making us capable of real communion with God and one another.

In conclusion, prayerful asceticism is an important part of the spiritual life because our instinct of self-preservation is broken and needs to be healed by the Lord – re-ordered for this glory. However we pray through this kind of instinctual brokenness, we must keep our eyes on the communion the Lord establishes us in and realize that interior transformation is God’s work. Our efforts then aim at making space for the Lord to act – this is why Therese’s Little Way can be even more mortifying than a physical discipline.

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The Ways of Prayer – Prostration

Among the Nine Ways of Prayer of St. Dominic, he seems to have associated prostration with the gift of tears.  To really weep, to have one’s heart punctured by the reality of a situation, this is the first step to real conversion.  And to prostrate oneself – to throw oneself flat on the ground – is a gesture not only of humility but also of begging.  It is in fact a pleading for mercy.  Because wanting to change and being able to change are two different things.  For a person to truly be able to change, he needs more than good intentions, he needs God’s mercy.  Mercy is love that suffers the affliction of another so that person’s dignity might be rescued.   Such love is a total free gift, a gift no one has a right to.  Yet the restoration of our dignity, the dignity of the sons and daughters of God, is something we all vitally need.  That is why, in asking for mercy, prostration is a fitting gesture to make with our body.  It is a gesture that says to God – “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof” and “Even the dogs receive their master’s table scraps.”  And if we feel like we no longer need to beg God for mercy for ourselves, then St. Dominic instructed his friars to shed tears of compunction for the world.

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Dominic’s Nine Ways of Prayer

Many who want a deeper prayer life find themselves unable to devote longer periods of time to pray because of distractions and the absence of devotion.  And it is true: one should not pray longer than one has devotion.  Christ himself warned us against using empty words in prayer or praying mindlessly.   But how then do we develop the kind of devotion where we are able to give our full attention to God for longer periods of time?

St. Dominic was able to pray for more extended periods of time with greater intensity because he used his body in prayer.  He and his first brethren experienced how praying with one’s body stirs up devotion in nine ways.  In this post, we will explore the first of these: bowing in prayer.   Dominic would bow whenever he came before an altar or crucifix or whenever anyone prayed, “Glory to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.”

This practice was not simply mechanistic: Humbly bowing his head was a heartfelt response for humility Christ embraced for his own sake and the sake of the whole world.  By practicing this bodily gesture he gave his heart a chance to be devoutly mindful of the Lord’s unimaginable and inexhaustible love.    

The heart does not always respond the way it should and has a tendency to forget what is most important.   Our freedom in Christ was bought at a great price.  He did not simply wish us to be free of the power of death, he offered his body and died that we might live.   The only proper response to such love is to freely love in return with our whole being – to offer the Lord a grateful heart.   But we are so fickle.  We fail to remember the gift we have recieved and our hearts grow often grow cold without our even being aware that this has happened.

But when we bow our heads in prayer it serves as a reminder to our heart and things that ought never be forgotten are called to mind once again.   What we do in with our bodies informs the heart.  At the same time, as our hearts are moved with devotion, our bodies become capable of offering true spiritual worship.  The bow that stirs loving gratitude suddenly becomes the expression of a true devotion, a real commitment to Christ.

This first way of prayer addresses a truth about the way God made us and the way He chose to save us.   When He created us in his image and likeness, our bodies were not inconvenient after thoughts.  The image of God in us is somehow manifest in our bodies – from infancy to old age.  This means that what we do with our bodies always has a spiritual dimension, something beyond this world that looks out to the Lord either accepting or rejecting that world.  Similarly, just as our salvation was worked out through the crucified body of Christ, our prayerful response also involves our bodies – the Christian body is meant to become a spiritual offering to God, and a humble bow which gratefully acknowledges God’s unsurpassable love is one way to make this offering.  

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