More productive prayer

STIRLING  Does your prayer life leave you frustrated — feeling like you should be getting more out of the holy experience of communicating with God, like you should be devoting more time to it or like you are going about it wrong?

If so, then let Michael St. Pierre, executive director of the Catholic Campus Ministry Association, become your “prayer coach” and put his years of expertise in workplace and personal time management, productivity and performance to work in your spiritual life. In his book, “The 5 Habits of Prayerful People: A No-Excuses Guide to Strengthening Your Relationship with God,” he gives Catholics the following strategies that can boost their confidence in building a consistent habit of prayer: passion and pursuit; presence; preparation and planning; persistence and perseverance; and pondering.

“In this book, I apply productivity strategies to prayer for people who want to grow in prayer but are very busy and don’t know how,” said St. Pierre. “What keeps us from a healthy prayer life? We usually lack feedback from other people. When we get good feedback on what we are doing, then we become more confident. This book can act as a coach, helping people build spiritual momentum in their prayer lives. Prayer will help absorb most — maybe not all — of life’s challenges and fill us with hope,” he said.

In “The 5 Habits of Prayerful People,” St. Pierre shares strategies to help readers stop procrastinating and kick start a meaningful relationship with God. The 96-page paperback gives Catholics inspiration by detailing the author’s many personal successes and frustrations with prayer — for example that he enjoys charismatic prayer but still finds it challenging to pray the rosary. Published on April 2, the book debuted at No 1. on Amazon.com’s new releases about prayer, he said.

With each chapter, St. Pierre draws in readers with his own life experiences, passages from Scripture or the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” or insights by anyone from popes and the saints to athletes and corporate titans. Each chapter ends with questions for readers, such as, “What would it look like for my prayer time to be more focused and less distracted?”; a prayer for them to recite; and a link to worksheets on his website, www.mikestpierre.com/prayer — all to allow them to focus their efforts, he said.

In the chapter about the first habit, “Passion and Pursuit,” St. Pierre urges readers to come to their prayer lives with a passion for God as God has for us. In the 4th century, St. Augustine wrote, “Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him.” Armed with passion, they then must pursue action — starting by carving out prayer time for themselves. They should choose a time that will not conflict with anything else on their calendar — like waiting for the kids to be in school or praying on their commute, said St. Pierre, former president of Morris Catholic High School, Denville.

The second habit, “Presence,” involves “showing up” for prayer. The following five practices can help: exercising the willpower to pray, during the busy day; praying at a regular time each day; using the right tools, such as the Bible, a journal, spiritual reading or rosary beads; praying in silence; and tracking their progress, St. Pierre said.

As part of the third habit, “Preparation and Planning,” penitents should prepare for opportunities for prayer in the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist.

The fourth habit, “Persistence and Perseverance,” requires readers to develop a mind-set of persistence — “stretching and developing themselves” — and perseverance — “a patient approach to learning over time”— that will help them overcome any obstacles to daily prayer, St. Pierre said.

The fifth habit, “Pondering,” asks readers to set aside quiet time in specific increments to “ponder,” or take stock of their lives and the will of God, or reading spiritual books. They should schedule time annually — for a few days on retreat; quarterly — for a few hours in the mountains, at home or at the beach; weekly — a full day without digital devices; and daily — regularly scheduled quiet time, St. Pierre said.

It took St. Pierre, founder of BOLD Youth Ministry and co-founder of the Men of St. Joseph ministry at the Shrine of St. Joseph in Stirling, three months to write “The 5 Habits of Prayerful People.” He prepared for it by having produced 30 videos about prayer on YouTube and 30 posts about it on his website, he said.

In his forward to the book, Chris Lowney, a Catholic speaker and author, writes that St. Pierre emphasizes the importance of “getting better at the ‘listening’ part of prayer.”

“The voice of God is easily drowned out by all the music, phone calls, television and social media that distract me all day long. It can be hard to tune in to what the Lord may be saying,” said Lowney, who spoke about strategies to rejuvenate the Church at St. Paul Inside the Walls: in 2017.