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The Connection between Education and Prayer

This Rock Volume 19, Number 1   January 2008     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   True Education Liberates By Rollin A. Lasseter   How We Got Where We Are   Inaccuracy is Lying   The Connection between Education and Prayer   Today: Not Education but Social Engineering   The Sin of Sloth: What the Couch Potato and the Workaholic Have in Common By Leon Suprenant   Further Reading   Former Anglican Clergymen Bolster British Catholicism By Joanna Bogle   Who Worships in the UK?   Loaves and Fishes: Fashionable Priests and the "Miracle of Sharing" By Steve Ray   Read the Different Accounts of the Miracle   What is a Miracle?   What Did the Fathers of the Church Teach?   Damascus Road Episcopal Clergyman Discovers True Home By Chris Findley   By the Book Latter-Day Saints and the "Great Apostasy." By Tim Staples   Eyes to See Ugly as Sin By Michael Schrauzer   Truth be Told The Popess Who Just Won’t Go Away By Robert P. Lockwood   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Subscribe    Permissions

The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it. Of course, school exercises only develop a lower kind of attention. Nevertheless, they are extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer.

In other words, even if we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry, our faculty for attention will be developed as we wrestle with its problems. Indeed, struggling with a distasteful subject is almost an advantage. Genuine effort is never wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence, on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.