I would read stories of the saints and would talk about how they went in front of our Lord and the plus of the sacrament, right, in front of the tabernacle, and they would pray, and hours would feel like minutes, just time flew by, and I would go do that, and park myself in front of our Lord in the Eucharist, and I'll tell you this,

hours didn't feel like minutes, minutes felt like hours.

My name is Father Mike Schmitz, and this is Ascension Presents. So, I was reading in the Catechism recently. It's called the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is phenomenal. Honestly, no commercial, well, it's commercial, but it's worth it.

I love the Ascension Edition. I was actually talking with some people who worked at Ascension the other day, and I was like, you guys, what you guys did with this is amazing. Okay, commercial over.

Anyways, reading the book, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, you know this, there are four pillars, so the Catechism. There's first pillar, what we believe, the creed, right, second pillar is how we worship the sacraments.

The third pillar is how we live morality, life in Christ, and the fourth pillar is prayer, like how we pray, as Catholic Christians. And one of my favorite sections in the Catechism is in this fourth pillar.

In this section called the Battle of Prayer. I don't know if I've ever talked about this before, but I am a big fan. Not because I'm like, oh, Father Mike, you think you're tough? You're going to the Battle of Prayer? That's not the reason why. I do not think I'm tough, and I don't want to go into the Battle of Prayer.

The reason why I am so grateful for the section, the Battle of Prayer, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is because when I started praying on purpose, like it was on my own time instead of my parents telling me, or the school I went to telling me, when I started praying on my own, one of the things I realized was,

it was hard. And I thought, I was doing something wrong because the impression I got from reading these stories of these saints who sounded like they went into mystical trance every single time they went to prayer, pray, is I thought it would be like a hot tub.

You know how you get in the hot tub? It's just like, oh, this is just soak it up, man. Like this is God's grace. You're in the presence of Jesus, just soak.

Like this should be the easiest thing in the world, and it wasn't the easiest thing in the world, man. It was tough.

So then, again, my consolation, the consolation I experienced when I realized in the Catechism where it says, prayer is a battle. It always presupposes effort.

I was like, oh my gosh, praise the Lord, because I thought I was doing something wrong. Let's actually look at what it says here.

It says, in the Catechism, paragraph 27, 25, it says, prayer is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part, but the gift of grace and a determined response on our part.

So obviously, prayer is always a response. It's a response to God's initiative. God is the one who invites us to pray. God is the one who enables us to pray.

And remember, we do not know how to pray. We need the Holy Spirit to teach us how to pray. We do not know how to pray as we ought, but prayer is a gift of grace.

And it's a determined response on our part. The second sentence here in paragraph 27, 25 says, it always presupposes effort, which means I'm going to have to engage with God's grace.

So the image is this. It's less, maybe it's less like a hot tub or you just kind of get in there and just kind of soak.

But maybe the analogy of water is okay. Maybe it's less like a hot tub and more like swimming. Here's my analogy. Let me float this by you.

Okay, let me float this by you. So you get into a swimming pool. And if there's water, you can swim. If there's no water, you can't swim.

So water is grace. If it's not there, good luck trying to float. You can't float. But if the water is there, you have to, you get into the pool.

And you have to kind of like move, right? You have to, you have to cooperate with the grace in order to stay afloat. Sometimes it's really easy, right?

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