When a Catholic prays he is deeply aware, as is any Christian, of the mystery presiding over what he is doing. He knows himself to be mortal, for a start, and for a mortal to step across the line circumscribing the precincts of the Ineffable is an act fraught with imponderables. Who am I to do this? And how am I to do this? And do I suppose that anything is actually occurring here beyond my own subjectivity? Is there any encouraging word from the other side? Is it all presumption or, worse, nonsense?

Such questions, flung at him from an unbelieving civilization, may find an echo in his own innermost being, and he will recognize this echo as, in one profound sense, not altogether misbegotten. A mortal should indeed be exquisitely aware of his mortality and, hence, of his shocking inadequacy to sustain what comes into play when he ventures across the line. It is not a bad attitude. It is probably a necessary ingredient in true pietas.

On the other hand, most mortals, quite rightly, are not thus paralyzed when they pray. “Lord, help me”, we say, or “Thank you, God”, and in saying this, we know that we are joined by the whole race of men, kings and peasants, philosophers and dunderheads, boulevardiers and rustics. It belongs to our humanity.

And not only this. We feel—we know, really—that whatever we pray, and however we say it, will be heard and received, insofar as the smallest rag of integrity spurs us to pray thus. The Most High does not sit as critic or arbiter of taste in the matter of human prayer.

On the other hand, we also know that we find ourselves helped insofar as we can call upon traditional forms of prayer. Far from fettering us, we discover that the already set form very frequently liberates us. It hands to us the very thing we wish we could say if we could find the words. It gives us our prayer, in fact. We have already, in earlier chapters, noted this paradox in connection with the liturgy: how fixed forms, far from constituting a grid locking us in, supply the grid by which we may find our way in the daunting landscape of worship.

To be Catholic is to exult in traditional forms of prayer. It is to look on the immense deposit of fixed prayers as a treasury, a treasury with no door locked. All may enter and help themselves, all the time.

First and foremost, of course, is the Lord’s Prayer, usually known among Catholics as the Our Father. In this brief address to God, the whole mystery of God and man is opened to us. Father. Our Father. Who art in heaven. Hallowed. Every word opens onto the whole vista. And the seven petitions place upon our very tongues all that a mortal should be saying on the long itinerary from his conception, stained by original sin, to the fruition of his journey in the Beatific Vision. It is a prayer to be said constantly, for insofar as I say it, investing myself in it with all earnestness, it will configure me to Christ.

It is also a prayer that may be brought into play when I am at a loss altogether about what to say. “Our Father, who art in heaven”: Catholics resort to this utterance in time of great perplexity, or of fear, or of grief, or of a hundred other taxing situations. One scarcely knows what words to frame: the Our Father supplies one’s need.

There is even a sense among Catholics, not altogether discouraged by the Church, that the Our Father may be repeated as a sort of “omniprayer”, that is, that one may pray this prayer with a particular intention in mind—say, for one’s son, that he may be defended from harm and sin, or for one’s daughter, that God’s angel will overshadow her, or for someone sick. To pray the Lord’s Prayer in this context is to acknowledge that, in a mystery, its seven petitions gather up all possible intentions and requests and that the posture before the Throne of Grace that it imposes on us is a right one. Once I saw a Catholic mother gather her two teenage children to her at the edge of her husband’s grave after his (Protestant) burial. The three repeated the Lord’s Prayer. One could hear in the hurried mumble her supplications for her husband, her sorrow, her prayers for her fatherless children, and her hope that somehow a “Catholic” seal might crown what had occurred at the burial. One knew that all of this was borne up to the Throne, infinitely enhanced, by the words of the Our Father.

Without any doubt at all, the second most resorted-to traditional prayer among Roman Catholics is the Hail Mary.

This is a prayer virtually incomprehensible to non-Catholics. For a start, it sounds mind-numbing in its repetitiveness. How, it may be asked by earnest inquirers, does this sort of thing differ from pagan prayer—from Tibetans turning their prayer wheels, say?

The answer to this question lies in the notion that the prayers of the Rosary, with its many repetitions, are not so much—not at all, actually—a matter of one’s plucking at the sleeve of the Most High until he vouchsafes to turn his attention to one, like the judge in the Gospel who was nettled into acting on the woman’s behalf by her sheer persistence, but rather are a matter of “tarrying” in a certain place. One’s lips are continually forming words acutely appropriate for any believer in any possible situation, and this assists one’s mind to tarry in this place, along with the one, namely, the Virgin Mary, who, among us mortals, exhibited the perfect response to the will of God, namely, the Ecce, and Fiat, which we have already pondered in an earlier chapter.

The idea is, insofar as I will place my whole being here, in my present situation, with Mary, I will to that extent have ordered my soul to wholehearted obedience and purity vis-à-vis the Word of the Lord that is announced to me by this immediate circumstance. That is, just as Mary’s response to the angel, whose word broke unexpectedly into her life and forever altered that life utterly, was one of obedience and readiness to be at the service of whatever was being asked of her, so I, when I hail her, place my own soul in the place of admiration for that obedience and of extolling that obedience. It is an excellent place to be, indeed, a salvific place to be. I will never come to the joy of the City of God until my entire being has long since learned, in every thread of its fabric, to say, like Mary, Ecce; Fiat. The word in her case, to which she responded obediently, was that she would be the mother of the Savior. The word in my case, on this particular morning, may be that I sit in a traffic jam for an hour or lose my spouse, or my health, or my life. Faith hears in every circumstance, no matter how chaotic, taxing, or untoward, the voice of the Lord: it is a lesson of such difficulty that most of us will scarcely have begun in that school by the time we reach our own hour of death. If my habit has been, day by day, to place myself in the company of the Virgin in her obedience, to oblige all that is in me to hail her, as did the angel, and to laud her response, then it may be that I will find help in my ordeal by myself saying Ecce and Fiat to the messenger of God. The fruit of Mary’s innermost being, because of her obedience, was Jesus. Incarnate Love. Will mine be vexation, despair, or rage? Alas. By praying the Rosary, one is consciously, daily, placing oneself in the precincts of obedience, so that, as the Holy Spirit overshadows one as he did the Virgin, that which is born from one’s innermost being will increasingly be Jesus himself.

The address to Mary rather than to her Son is also a stumbling block to non-Catholics. Aren’t we enjoined to make our requests known to God himself? Is not Christ Jesus the one Mediator between God and man? Are not, then, all the prayers of the Rosary misdirected?

The answer to these questions lies in the notion of the communion of saints, which again we have pondered in connection with the Virgin’s title as “Mediatrix”. It is a matter of the priesthood of our Lord being, not a solitary or exclusive priesthood that leaves us all inert spectators, but rather a priesthood that brims and flows over upon all who constitute his Body. Hence we all pray for each other, even though we know that his prayers for us are sufficient by themselves ten thousand times over. In doing so, we evince our profound participation in the intercessory ministry of the High Priest. Mary, of course, is first among us, with her Ecce and Fiat, and also because she was drawn into the mystery of God in a way no patriarch, prophet, or apostle ever knew. And this communion of saints spans the abyss of death: we in pilgrimage here on earth are, because of the victory over death won by our Lord, as much one in the priestly communion with those who have gone before us as we are with those around us for whose prayers we ask day by day. Hence it is that the Hail Mary is addressed to Mary. It does not call Christ’s supreme and sole and sufficient priesthood into question: it utters itself within that priesthood.

The Hail Mary, like the Lord’s Prayer, is very often prayed, even as a brief exclamation, in some situation where what one might wish to say, given perfect utterance, eludes one. This prayer “gathers in”, so to speak, any supplications we may have. To outsiders it may look as though Catholics rattle off the Hail Mary at some public occasion or in time of distress (in the Gulag or Auschwitz), because they don’t know how to pray and must resort to a rote form. The truth, at bottom, is rather that to be Catholic is to have entered into the “Marian mystery”, as it were, and to have found in this context a particularly pure region of prayer, a region that stretches beyond the place where each word is strapped to one specific meaning (“O Lord, give us strength here in our hour of trouble”), and where the words themselves (“Hail, Mary, full of grace”) bear the heavy freight of all that we would like to say. Both forms of prayer are crucial; neither may be pitted against the other. Neither is preferable to the other. Both testify to the manifold, and mysterious, nature of the things that surround us every time we approach the Throne.

The Rosary, however, is not primarily a vehicle for intercession. It is a traditional devotion that places the believer, day by day, in the presence of the Gospel mysteries as they were experienced by the one of us who was most completely disposed to receive them, namely, the Virgin Mary. One moves, step by step, along the path that our salvation took when God came to us as Savior. Or rather, one tarries at each step, fixing his gaze on the tableau and desiring to be wholly receptive to all that is there. The repetitions are not unlike the “Ah . . . ah. . .” one might hear from someone overwhelmed by a sunset or by the flight of a swallow; or again, they are not unlike the “Amen . . . amen . . .” or even the “Praise you, Jesus” one hears murmured as a sort of continuo in charismatic communal prayer.

To be Catholic is to draw heavily on tradition in one’s prayers. The Lord’s Prayer is a scriptural text, taken up by tradition and placed at the center of all the Church’s prayer; and the Hail Mary is a prayer drawn from Dominican and Cistercian tradition and also placed near the center of Christian prayer.

The tradition of prayer is, of course, immense. The Gloria Patri, wholly consonant with Scripture although not an actual scriptural text itself, is a case in point: just a brief exclamation, but gathering up in itself all that worship strives to say. The formula In nomine—“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”—is another: brief, scriptural, and appropriate to a thousand situations, reminding one as it does that not only our conscious acts of worship but also every task and every motion of our hearts should proceed under this ensign. The Magnificat, sung by the Virgin herself, has been taken up by the Church’s tradition and placed in the mouth of every one of the redeemed. Indeed, God has regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden (me). Indeed, he has done great things for me. He has filled the hungry with good things. The tradition supplies the believer with words to say that, left to his own devices, he might not think of saying, and certainly not so succinctly. The Nunc Dimittis—“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace”—likewise has been borrowed by tradition from Simeon and offered by the Church to all of us. Can I say, at the end of the day, that mine eyes have seen his salvation today? Am I at peace? Am I ready to depart? They are searching questions.

The Phos hilaron (“O gladsome Light”) and the Te lucis ante terminum (“To Thee before the light fades”), both evening hymns, supply us with traditional words that far, far exceed our own halting attempts to frame our evening addresses to the Most High.

In this connection, of course, we find ourselves at the doorstep of the psalter. The psalms. Here we have, once more, the fruitful union of Scripture and tradition. The songs themselves are Scripture; but it was tradition that took them up and placed them at the core of the Church’s very life. For centuries they have been chanted, morning, noon, and night, in the Church. No one who has ever attempted Christian prayer on any sustained terms will have been able to go very far without the psalms. Beatus vir; In exitu Israel; Miserere mei, Deus; Ecce quam bonum; Quemadmodum desiderat cervus: the very phrases strike joy unbounded into the heart of the Christian.

The psalms: it is not for nothing that the Church offers them to us, not only daily, but repeatedly for each day. The voice speaking in them is the voice of the psalmist, of the King, of Israel, and, in a mystery, of Christ and of the Church, and, thence, of the man whose life is lived in conspectu Dei. His aspirations, his exultations, his rages and terrors and discouragements and despair: all is spread out immediately in the sight of God. In these songs we hear what it is like to live life in complete transparency before God. We encounter, and are brought into, the attitude of the man for whom God is everything. And when we reflect on this, we realize that this is, in fact, the very blueprint for our humanity: there is no being human at all without direct and unremitting reference to God in whose image we are formed. The existence, life, and consciousness of an atheist, ironically, draws upon God for its source, sustenance, and purpose. In the psalms we find the songs that define us mortals, we might say. They constitute a touchstone by which we may test, day by day, whether we are heading toward fatuity and perdition or toward authenticity and joy. Insofar as my innermost being is configured to the psalms, it is in good health. (Even the imprecatory psalms, as C. S. Lewis has pointed out, can at least show me what I, if I exist as “the wicked” to some other soul, can do to that soul by way of thrusting it toward this terrible rage and vindictiveness. It is a solemn warning.)

To be Catholic, and thus to be daily under the scrutiny of the psalms, is to live one’s life in the presence of this touchstone, which judges one’s attitudes: my fears, joys, triumphs, wrath, hopes, disappointments, and despondency, as well as my artfulness in finding pretexts for my sins—all is brought to the test in these songs. Indeed, for a Catholic, there is a profound sense in which the psalms take priority over all philosophy, poetry, song, and psychology; for what we have here is infallible. We bring our efforts (philosophy, poetry, and so on) to this touchstone to see whether we are still living and functioning in the precincts of the True.

Furthermore, to be Catholic is to have at one’s fingertips, so to speak, an immense tradition of hymnody. All Christian traditions, of course, depend heavily on hymnody, and a Catholic will find delight in coming upon the great Lutheran deposit of hymns or, perhaps even more, the Anglican. (Ironically, it is the Anglicans who keep alive, in translations of great dignity by the nineteenth-century scholar J. M. Neale, many of the hymns from antiquity and the Middle Ages. One hears the work of Venantius Fortunatus and St. Joseph the Hymnographer, of Rabanus Maurus and Adam of St. Victor and Bernard and Thomas. It is a part of the treasury to be rediscovered by Catholics.)

The great eucharistic hymns of Thomas, still very much in use in the Catholic Church, draw us close to the mysteries of which they speak, and to which our own resources are so inadequate: Tantum ergo, Pange Lingua, O Salutaris Hostia, and Lauda Sion. To be Christian and innocent of these texts is to be greatly deprived. Thomas’ austere lines assist us as we approach the cusp where eternity meets time, that is, where faith is asked to see in human flesh the eternal Son, and in the appearance of bread and wine the Body and Blood of that Son. It is a task to which we are not equal: to be Catholic is to be in grateful debt to Thomas, again and again.

There is one aspect of Catholic prayer that seems very odd indeed to non-Catholics. I speak of pilgrimages.

To be human at all is to be familiar with the general idea here, since of course nearly everyone wants, not only to hear about Washington at Valley Forge or the pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth or Paul Revere’s ride, but to go to the places where these events occurred. Enormous expense and time and inconvenience are poured into the effort to get ourselves to places that seem hallowed, somehow, by what has happened there. Gettysburg; Concord; the Tower of London; Normandy Beach; Jerusalem.

Jerusalem. We seem to have passed a delicate frontier here. Certainly Normandy Beach, for example, is “holy” in the sense that we find ourselves reduced, eventually, to silence here as somehow the only response possible in this acreage of death. Death here or at Treblinka or at Gettysburg—that is, death suffered, in some sense, for the rest of us—seems to hover and brood and pall. It will not submit to the category “a mere fact of past history”. Somehow it is here, still. Our humanity itself testifies that this impression that comes over us in such places is a true one. Logic and pragmatism and common sense must themselves bow here. We will make our pilgrimage thither and stand, silent.

But in Jerusalem there is more. This is a city holy to three religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; so the notion of pilgrimage thither is familiar to half the world.

Where is the line between a tour and a pilgrimage? Am I a tourist or a pilgrim? For most of us, most of the time, the former word obtains in connection with our travels back and forth. But if it should happen that on a day during my tour of France I visit Lourdes, then I seem to find myself mantled with a mantle somewhat more sobering than the tourist’s T-shirt and shorts. What is here? Why does one come here? The scenery can be bested at a thousand locations in Europe. And hordes of people is not what one seeks out on one’s holiday. Why come here?

You come, if there is anything deeper than impertinence at work in you, as a pilgrim. Prayer is made here. The air seems clarified with holiness. (This seems to be the testimony of everyone, both believer and nonbeliever, about Lourdes.) I come here in order to locate myself in physical proximity to events that themselves seem redolent of holiness. I come, perhaps, to bring my own insufficiency, physical or spiritual, and to offer it in particularly auspicious precincts, as an oblation. I come in order to benefit from whatever the man of faith may encounter here.

Thus Jerusalem. Thus pilgrimage. Canterbury, Walsingham, Tepeyac, Fatima, Assisi, Capernaum, Mt. Athos, La Grande Chartreuse: to be Christian at all is to be aware of these as more than dots on the folded map. This “more” is a sacramental more, and to be Catholic is to be profoundly rooted in the awareness, so vibrantly at work in such places, that the meeting point of the physical and the transphysical is not only significant but also, as it may be, salutary. It matters that St. Thomas Becket was murdered here. That spot there in the floor. It matters that our Lady is said to have vouchsafed an appearance there, right in that grotto there. It matters that St. Francis lived and worked here, or that monastic prayer has gone up from these walls for centuries, or that God himself walked here in the days of his flesh. I may pray anywhere, to be sure: but, being a creature of flesh and blood, who has his existence in time and place, I find that actual proximity to the holy event or the holy figure yields not only a quickened inner awareness of the holy but also a benefit that can be said to be at work only in the place itself, quite apart from my own good will and ardor. Non-Catholics, whose piety does not run commonly to pilgrimages, will testify to a man that to be in Galilee or at Caesarea Philippi is an experience not to be attributed merely to feelings worked to a pitch of fervor by one’s own devotion. It matters that I am now here. Not to be here is not the same thing. The only true response that my mortality can offer here is to kneel and pray. The clicking camera, while perhaps inevitable, does not seem to exhaust the reasons for one’s having come hither.

To be Catholic is to understand pilgrimage as being of the very warp and woof of faith. Of course one goes on pilgrimage if one can: it is a joyous and health-giving thing, and it belongs to our humanity so to do.

Pilgrimage brings us, then, to the tradition of preserving and honoring relics. To be Catholic is to be at home with the practice, whereas to the non-Catholic eye the business may seem to sail too near the wind of superstition and idolatry. Come: this bit of bone here: it won’t do. It is probably specious for a start; and even if it is what it is claimed to be, it has no virtuous properties.

The Catholic’s response to misgivings like this is of a piece with his response when taxed about anything at all to do with the sacramental, namely, that it is not magic—but neither is it nothing. Neither chemistry nor logic will yield up the secrets here. The strictures spring, often, from genuine candor and good will and by no means need to imply a cavalier, much less sacrilegious, approach. To certain species of Christian faith, the notion that any efficacy, or even much interest, attaches to a fragment of someone’s garment, say, or to a bone splinter is scandalous.

Once again, as in the matter of pilgrimages, a Catholic may point to common human experience for analogies. The lover with the lock of his beloved’s hair; the snapshot, all faded and creased; the pressed flower; the figurine bought long ago in Venice when we were so happy together: we are clearly creatures for whom such artifacts are beyond valuing. And of course we all peer, round-eyed, across the velvet cord into Marie Antoinette’s boudoir to see the chaplet or missal she used on her last night before the arrest. We squint at Washington’s false teeth and Jefferson’s little spectacles on the desk.

What does it all signify?

Physical continuity. The description in the textbook won’t altogether satisfy. The abstract fact in one’s mind won’t either. Oddly, the thing matters. It seems to preserve in itself something of the personhood in question. A manuscript by Handel is infinitely more difficult to decipher than the published sheet of the same music: but that his very hand rested on this paper, pressed this paper, and that the notes are inked with ink dipped from the inkwell by the nib in his own fingers: this we will keep in the British Museum. For this we will pay ten thousand dollars.

Physical continuity. To be Catholic is to be a Christian whose piety has not been sundered from the physical, as though the only proper locale for religion is in the will. The Christians of the very first centuries went to pains to retrieve the bones of their martyr, and to keep them, to pray where they were kept. For them, the dead bodies of those martyrs were not nothing. The body is the epiphany of the very personhood, they believed, because they believed in the Incarnation. The body is not nothing. The women came to the Tomb bringing spices. They wept when it seemed that the Body had been taken hence. The body was not nothing, dead or alive. To be Catholic is to have one’s piety deeply rooted in these matters.

Hence relics. To read of George Washington is to be impressed. To see (but probably not to touch: there are warning signs all about) his hat and cloak is, somehow, to be brought nearer to him—and hence to the thing Washington embodies and figures forth for us all. To read of St. Polycarp is to be impressed. To see, and perhaps to touch, that which was his own is, somehow, to be brought nearer to him and hence to the thing Polycarp embodies and figures forth for us all.

It is also to be physically “in touch” (remember our mementi and snapshots) with Polycarp, who, Catholics believe, is praying for us; and at this point we have come back around to our earlier picture of prayer, and indeed of faith itself, as binding us to “the whole family in heaven and earth”.