WOF 031: 5 Ways to Pray Better Today
The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
Brandon Vogt
4.9 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 12 July 2016
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Whenever there's a survey asking Christians, "What's one area in your spiritual life you'd like to improve?", the answers almost inevitably center around prayer. In today's episode, Bishop Barron explains what precisely prayer is and then offers some simple steps as well as some more advanced techniques to help us all grow in intimacy with God. With this goal in mind, Bishop Barron leads listeners down five different avenues of prayer that range from informal dialogue to the mass itself. Finally, the listener question comes from a seminarian in Phoenix who wonders where Catholics should draw the line when it comes to the teachings of a notable 21st-century Christian writer.
Topics Discussed
- 0:18 - Bishop Barron discusses his upcoming trip to World Youth Day
- 4:00 - What is prayer and how does conversational prayer begin?
- 8:42 - How does God speak to us in prayer?
- 10:58 - What is "Lectio Divina" and how do we pray it?
- 14:45 - What are some forms of rote prayers and what is their benefit?
- 20:40 - What is the Liturgy of The Hours and how do we access it?
- 24:00 - How is the Liturgy of The Hours a universal prayer?
- 26:00 - How can enter into the Holy Mass specifically as a prayer?
- 28:00 - How might we advance through these five forms of prayer?
- 29:25 - What does Bishop Barron's holy hour entail?
- 35:20 - Listener Question: Where should we draw the line with N.T. Wright?
Bonus Resources
- Videos
- Bishop Barron on the Disorienting Quality of Real Prayer (Bishop Barron)
- Bishop Barron on the Lord's Prayer (Bishop Barron)
- Articles
- The Hundreth Anniversary of Thomas Merton's Birth (Bishop Barron)
- Homilies
- Hearing the Voice of God (Bishop Barron)
- The Mystery of the Mass (Bishop Barron)
- The Shepard's Voice (Bishop Barron)
- Books
- Praying with The Pivotal Players (Pre-Order)
- And Now I See: A Theology of Transformation (Bishop Barron)
- The Resurrection of the Son of God (N.T. Wright)
Find bonus links and resources for this episode at http://WordOnFireShow.com and be sure to submit your questions at http://AskBishopBarron.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. We're here once again with you. We're excited to be with you. |
| 0:08.0 | I'm Brandon Vot, the content director at Word on Fire, and joining us as he is every week is Bishop Robert Barron. Bishop Barron, great to have you. |
| 0:15.0 | Brandon, always joy to be on with you. |
| 0:18.0 | Hey, listen, you're getting ready to head off to Crack Off, Poland for World Youth Day. Tell us a little bit about that. |
| 0:26.0 | Yeah, I got invited, oh, maybe a month ago, and I wasn't planning on going because I've had such a busy summer, but I got invited and I thought, |
| 0:33.0 | how could I pass up going to, you know, John Paul II's hometown for this great event? And they invite the bishops to give catac ECs. |
| 0:42.0 | So I'm going to give three on successive days, and you go to a church somewhere in Crack Off and English-speaking kids will be there. |
| 0:50.0 | They want the catac ECs to be short, like 15, 20 minutes, and then time for a lot of Q&A. |
| 0:56.0 | There's also, I understand, a big Knights of Columbus low-cal for English speakers. And I've been asked to speak at that as well. |
| 1:04.0 | And then I'll be saying mass at each site after I give the talk. So I'm looking forward to it immensely. It'll be fun. |
| 1:11.0 | I think 85 American bishops are going 300 in total from around the world. I was at Madrid World Youth Day back in 2011, and I loved it. |
| 1:22.0 | So it's my first time obviously as a bishop, and I'm looking forward to it immensely. |
| 1:27.0 | Now you were over there in Crack Off a handful of years ago when you were filming the Catholicism series. What was that experience like? |
| 1:34.0 | I loved it. I'd never been to Poland before. We went first to Warsaw, and we filmed up there, and then we drove. |
| 1:41.0 | I remember we got in this little car, and we drove, and on the map, I was a Chicagoan. Look like a big expressway. |
| 1:46.0 | I thought, oh, we'll cover that. Well, it wasn't an expressway. I was like a little road. |
| 1:51.0 | It took us about five or six hours to get down to Crack Off. We were just exhausted. |
| 1:58.0 | But I loved it. Crack Off is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. And Vavo Hill, where they have the Kings Palace and the Cathedral, where John Paul II was ordained, |
| 2:09.0 | it's where the great saints and kings were buried. And then we went to John Paul's residence, the home of the archbishop of Crack Off. |
| 2:19.0 | It was very moving to see his chapel, to see where he was trained as a young kid when he was escaping the Nazis and was parvin' underground seminary there. |
| 2:27.0 | Anyway, I loved Crack Off. I thought it was beautiful. I couldn't wait to get back. So that's another reason why I accepted this invitation. |
| 2:34.0 | Today we're going to talk about a subject of perennial importance for Christians, and it's the topic of prayer. |
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