CRUX — How Do I Pray? Part A

For a long time I prayed to God the way you'd speak to a very important stranger. Respectful. Careful. Following the right script. And somewhere in my twenties I realized: I have been praying to this God for years, and I'm not sure I actually know him.

That's the thing no one tells you about prayer in CCD. You can learn every formal prayer the Church has — the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Act of Contrition, the whole Rosary — and still be missing the most important thing: a relationship with the person on the other end.

This module is about that shift. What it looks like to move from reciting prayers to actually talking to God. And why, once you understand who he actually is, you'll wonder how you ever settled for less.

Watch First The Power of Prayer — Fr. Mike Schmitz Ascension Presents · 6 min

The Moment Everything Changed

For most Catholics who grew up in the Church, prayer was introduced the same way math was — as a set of procedures to learn and perform correctly. You memorized the prayers. You said them at the right times. You followed the structure. And as long as you did it right, you assumed something was happening.

The problem with that approach isn't that the prayers are wrong. The Our Father is the prayer Jesus himself taught us. The Hail Mary is ancient and beautiful. There is nothing wrong with the words. The problem is that you can recite all of them without ever actually showing up — without ever directing your whole self toward the person the words are addressed to.

Prayer changes when you stop thinking of it as an obligation and start thinking of it as a conversation. And conversations change when you actually know the person you're talking to.

From a CRUX Member

It wasn't until I started going deeper into the theology — reading Mere Christianity, studying Scripture with a commentary, actually sitting with who Jesus claimed to be — that something clicked. I'd been praying to this God my whole life. But I hadn't really known him. The more I understood the Scripture, the more I realized: this isn't some distant authority figure I'm supposed to report to. That's my Abba. That's my Savior and my Lord. He'll be there now and for an eternity to come. Once you understand that, prayer stops feeling like a chore and starts feeling like the most natural thing in the world.

Prayer is not a beautiful invention of man; it is a descent of God into our smallness. It is the gift God offers us — that we may speak to him as a son speaks to his father.

— Pope Benedict XVI

What Prayer Actually Looks Like

One of the most freeing things anyone can tell a new Catholic — or a returning one — is that prayer doesn't have to look like anything in particular. It doesn't require a kneeler, a specific time, a formal posture, or a prepared script. Jesus prayed in gardens, on hillsides, at dinner tables, and in the middle of crowds. What made it prayer was not the setting but the orientation: his whole self directed toward his Father.

That said, structure helps. Not because God requires it, but because human beings do. We are creatures of rhythm and habit, and a prayer life that only happens when you feel like it tends not to happen very much at all. The Church's tradition of morning and evening prayer — bookending the day with intentional time with God — isn't arbitrary. It's practical wisdom about how relationships actually deepen.

From a CRUX Member

My morning prayer usually runs twenty to thirty minutes. I start with a devotional or go straight to Scripture — Bible open, commentary on the side so I can actually understand what I'm reading rather than just reading words. Then I journal whatever comes up. What the passage said to me, what it stirred, what I want to take into the day. By the time I close the journal, something has settled. I carry it with me.

At night, right before bed, it's about ten minutes. This is my open mic with God. I start by thanking him — specifically, not generally. A good conversation at work. A friend who called. A moment that went better than it could have. Gratitude first, because gratitude is the posture that opens everything else.

Then I tell him where I fell short. Not to beat myself up, but because I think honesty with God requires naming the real things. Maybe I was short with someone because I was tired. Maybe I did something I'm not proud of. I don't deserve his forgiveness, and I know it, and I say so — and then I receive it anyway, because that's who he is.

Then I just talk. Dreams, hopes, things I'm worried about, things I want him to bless someday. He's my Abba. He can handle all of it. I close with Psalm 23 — a formal prayer to end on solid ground — and the sign of the Cross.

The Thing Nobody Tells You

Prayer doesn't have to be a formal sit-down. Some of the most powerful moments happen in the middle of an ordinary day.

A random moment on a drive. A quiet minute before a hard meeting. A flash of gratitude in the middle of something good. The Catholic tradition calls this ora et labora — pray and work — the understanding that prayer and ordinary life are not two separate tracks but one continuous orientation toward God.

When Jesus said to "pray without ceasing," he wasn't calling everyone to become a contemplative monk. He was describing a posture — a life where God is never far from your awareness, where the small moments of the day become small conversations rather than dead air.

You don't need thirty minutes and a quiet room to pray. You need the intention to turn toward God. Everything else can be built around that.

"Pray without ceasing."

— 1 Thessalonians 5:17

When It's Working

There's a particular quality to prayer when it's really alive — a sense that you are not alone in the room, that what you are doing matters, that something is happening even when nothing dramatic is occurring. It doesn't always feel this way. But when it does, it's unmistakable.

From a CRUX Member

The moments I love most in morning prayer are when I land on a verse in Scripture that I've read a dozen times before and suddenly it says something completely different. Something that speaks directly to what's on my heart that day — a situation I walked into the prayer not even planning to think about. That's not coincidence. That's the Holy Spirit working through the Word.

What I've come to love even more, though, is making space to listen. When you build a real relationship with God, you start to notice — as you're praying — that the right answer is becoming clear. It might not be what you walked in hoping to hear. But you walk out knowing what needs to be done. You can feel the Spirit shaping how you see the thing you're carrying.

I've never heard the voice of God like thunder. But after years of this, I know the difference between my own thoughts and something that arrives while I'm praying that I didn't bring with me. That difference is worth protecting time for.

When It Isn't Working

The Honest Part

Some days prayer feels like a chore. Some seasons God feels completely absent. Both of those things are normal, and neither of them means the relationship is broken.

There are mornings when the passage I'm reading does nothing for me. When I have a hundred things pressing on me and the thirty minutes feels like time I don't have. When I ask God something directly and hear no answer and feel no sense of what to do next. In those moments, it can genuinely feel like God has turned away.

The saints called this experience spiritual aridity or "the dark night." Every serious person of prayer has known it. John of the Cross wrote a whole theological account of it. Thérèse of Lisieux spent her last years in profound spiritual darkness. Mother Teresa's private letters revealed that she lived in it for decades.

What the tradition teaches — and what experience confirms — is that showing up anyway is itself the prayer. You come. You sit. You read. You speak the words even when they feel like they're going nowhere. The act of showing up in the dry season is a form of faithfulness that matters, whether you feel it or not.

God does not measure your prayer life by how alive it feels. He measures it by whether you kept coming back. The dry seasons are not punishment. They are the part of any real relationship where you discover whether what you have is rooted deeply enough to survive the weather.

Part B picks up from here — the specific forms of Catholic prayer, how to pray with Scripture, what the Rosary is actually for, and how to build a rhythm that holds across the seasons, dry and alive alike.