Is God Calling you to a life of Prayer Lived in Community?Vocation Weekend for men in Mount Saint Joseph Abbey, Roscrea, Co. Tipperary. 9th – 11th March. For more information text or ring Br Malachy 085 8338503 or email malachy@msjroscrea.ie Are you ready to answer God’s call?
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PRAYER
The monk is called to a life of prayer. The traditional prayer of the monk is the book of psalms and hence, it has become traditional also to think of the monk as one who loves to pray these psalms. This is still true.
The psalter is the monk’s prayer book. The saying or the chanting of psalms is still basic to the monk’s life. Here too there have been various changes in the course of history as to manners and methods in the praying of the psalter. At times the monks have said a great many psalms in a day, some times in rather elaborate forms.
In connecting psalmody and the monk we bring together two important elements: that a monk is a man of prayer and that the monk is a man of the psalter.
The monk is a man of prayer and the monastery is there to help him achieve this. To pray means to make love to God, to touch with God, in communion with Him. This could mean long hours in church, many hours with divine service: it need not. What it does mean and what is basic is the that the monk lives in a setting, an atmosphere, a world of prayer. He is a man to whom prayer is his life, his love. In a sense he is always at prayer. this prayer may at times be formal and explicit: Holy Mass, for example. At other times, quiet and in formal. But it is more or less always there somehow or other, one way or other. It is as a man with good wife: she is in a sense never out of his mind and heart, never far from him.
— Aspects Of The Monastic Calling, page 25 and 26 by Father Matthew Kelly, OCSO.
