Prayer and Study--Almost the Same Thing?

 This week's post comes to us from Professor Adam Myers, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at MMMU.

Prayer and Study 

Today, on 7 March, the Catholic Church remembers the day that St Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s pre-eminent teacher, died in 1274. You may not know much about St Thomas Aquinas. He was a member of the Order of Preachers, a religious order founded by St Dominic. For that reason, friars in this order are called Dominicans.  

There are two things Dominicans did then and do today quite a bit of: they pray and study in regular rhythm.  

Here at Mount Mercy, a Catholic liberal arts university, it seems fitting to take a moment today to think about those two things: prayer and study. 

It shouldn’t surprise us to think that these two activities go together. Then again, students can often be so busy with studying that they can’t imagine having time to pray, even if they wanted to.  

Or perhaps you have the idea that praying, while meaningful and worthwhile, is in the end not very productive and perhaps even a waste of time. 

But both prayer and study are about one fundamental thing: order. Let me say something about what I mean about order. 

Order 

Order is about priorities. It is about ranking. We rank the various things we love in our lives all the time. Sometimes we rank those loves well (when I prioritize students above my stamp collection), sometimes badly (as when I prioritize my work above my family).  

Our actions have a certain kind of order to them too. Take a simple example. I get in the car in order to go to the grocery store. I go to that store to buy food. I buy the food to prepare a meal. I prepare a meal to celebrate a feast with others. That’s order.  

Sometimes we forget what we are doing. Through highway hypnosis, I forget I was headed to the store. Once I recall the ultimate goal I was aiming for, order is restored to my actions. You cannot restore order to what you’re doing without remembering the goal of what you’re doing.  

It would be foolish if, when you forget your ultimate goal, you just to pick some new goal. For the fact is, I wouldn’t have headed to the store in the first place if I hadn’t wanted to make a meal. And I wouldn’t have intended to make a meal if I hadn’t wanted to feast with others. The feast is that for the sake of which I do those other, penultimate things. It is the thing I ultimately want. The thing I really want. 

Prayer and Order 

What has all this got to do with prayer? Here I follow St Thomas closely: prayer brings order to our desires. Sometimes we may think that prayer is just telling God what we want. But it is also, even more fundamentally, about the order of those desires. It’s about figuring out what it is we all truly want, deep down, and thereby bringing order to all the other desires we have.  

St Thomas has a name for the thing that each of us truly want, deep down: God. 

When I pray, I am remembering that Goal. Just as I remember that I am getting into the car to go to the store, to get food, but ultimately to prepare a meal for a feast: so also, when I pray, I remember the ultimate thing I am after—God.  

If I get distracted from my goal of getting to the store (so that I can get home to make a meal, so that I can prepare a feast for others…), remembering my ultimate goal helps me to remove obstacles and ignore distractions.  

Just so, when I pray, I can look at my whole life and figure out what distractions and obstacles are keeping me from the goal that I truly desire, deep down. 

There may be lots of reasons why your experience of prayer doesn’t have this effect. It is perfectly intelligible to ask, “And why exactly do I want to prepare a feast?” I have to see the desirability of the goal in order for it to bring order to my life. Similarly, you have to see the desirability of God in order for prayer to be the kind of thing that brings order to your life.  

The Life of a Student 

God may not appear very desirable when so many other desirable things jockey for our attention on a daily basis. And these goods are ever-present even at Mount Mercy. 

Think about it. By getting a degree from Mount Mercy, you increase your earning potential. You might garner a great reputation in your community for being a dedicated nurse, a committed teacher, or an entrepreneurial philanthropist. All those things aside, you may just think the four years of college are just about the sheer pleasure of it all.  

Money, reputation, pleasure—these things, in general, aren’t bad. But there’s one thing that St Thomas thought serious study should reveal about these goods—they’re penultimate, second-to-last at best.  

It’s pretty easy to tell that money, for instance, isn’t the ultimate thing. For one can always ask, “What do I want to make money for?” To fail to ask that question is like thinking that going to the grocery store is the real goal, when in fact the real goal is to get food there and then go home and prepare a feast. 

The goal of serious, liberal arts study is to make sure you keep asking that question—what is this desirable thing for?—until you hit paydirt and find the truly desirable thing.  

And here’s where study and prayer tie together. If prayer brings order to our desires, and if serious study is meant to help us find the ultimately desirable thing, then both activities work in harmony. 

They each point us towards a liberating awareness of what, deep down, is truly desirable. 

And that is why St Thomas, like all his Dominican confreres then and now, have tended to consummate their studying by going to the chapel and giving attention to God in prayer.