Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmidt and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast,

where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture and passed down through the tradition of the Catholic faith.

The Catechism in a year is brought to you by Ascension.

In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church discovering our identity and God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is Day 340. We're reading paragraphs 2650 to 2655. Just a few short paragraphs today. It's the beginning of chapter 2. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes a foundations of faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism in a year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com slash CIY, and you can click follow or subscribe to your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications. You know, it's day 340, which means what? If there's a home stretch, this is kind of close to the home stretch. and I just want to offer a word of thanks at the end of every episode I always say I'm praying for you and I am I hope

you know that I hope you know that literally every day in my prayers I'm praying for you who are listening

who are pressing play every day and even if you miss a day I'm still praying for you that day

it doesn't matter and just so grateful for everyone who has supported me, but also everyone who's part of this producing this podcast with your prayers and financial gifts because it takes a team of people to get this whole thing done. And so grateful, couldn't know without you. So thank you. Okay, day 340. Let's get started here. As I said yesterday, we're starting chapter two. And the section is, as you know, if you have the reading plan, it is the tradition of prayer. And we're going to start by looking at how do we pray. And we're only doing a couple paragraphs today. I mean, we're just really dipping our toes into this because, like, in a couple days, we'll talk about how we have prayer to the Father, prayer to Jesus. We talk about prayer in the Holy Spirit and communion with the Holy Mother of God. There's all these aspects of prayer. And so today as we kind of just basically frame up the house, you know, a little bit, we're going to look at what is prayer? What is it not? And in the first paragraph of today's section, it kind of highlights right away, it says prayer cannot be reduced to the spontaneous outpouring of interior impulse.

It's just, it's not just something that kind of just flows from us.

We're going to talk about this when it comes to my favorite section coming up soon.

It's not just something that is always merely spontaneous.

Obviously prayer can be spontaneous, but it's not the mere spontaneous outpouring

of interior impulse. We have to have the will to pray, and we have to learn how to pray. We don't

know how to pray. We have to seek the scriptures to be taught by that, but also we have to be given

the Holy Spirit that can teach us how to pray.

And not only that, but we need the church, the living and believing and praying church to teach

the children of God how to pray. You know, sometimes we want the nuts and bolts. I just tell me

what it is. Tell me how to do this and let me do it on my own. Prayer is not like that.

Yes, we can have tools for prayer. Yes, we can have some techniques for prayer, but prayer can never be reduced to a technique just in the same way that it can't be reduced to the spontaneous outpouring of interior impulse, right? It's deeper than that. It's richer than that. That's what we're going to talk about today. What's at the heart of the well springs of prayers? What we're going to be talking

about today? So as we launch into today, let's stop talking about prayer and start praying. We pray in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen, Father, and heaven, we give your praise and glory. Thank you so much for bringing us to this day. We thank you and praise your name. We bless you because you blessed us. we glorify you because you are worthy of all glory.

In this moment, we pray for those who are close to us. We pray for the needs of

our family members and our friends. We pray, Lord God, for our enemies. For those who hate us, for those

who have heard us.

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