Brendan Hoban: Prayer must not be reduced to just a formula 

Western People 30.6.2026.

Part of the price paid for writing a weekly column in the Western People and presenting a weekly religious radio programme on Midwest Radio is that I’m often the recipient of unsolicited material that someone somewhere decides I need to read. Much of the time it takes the form of suggestions, opinions, proposals, reservations, criticism and inevitably abuse! All for the good of religion, of course. Once it used to discommode me but now it’s just part of the weather of my life.
More particularly in recent times it takes the form of some ideological tract that’s been used to point out ‘the errors of your ways’ or ‘for your own good’ or some such worthy motive. Or occasionally it’s ‘messages from heaven’ courtesy of some visionary who’s having regular chats with Our Lord or Our Lady.
Recently someone sent me a book of messages from a ‘visionary’, messages which it claimed come from Our Lady and which contained the usual mix of depression about the state of the world, a copious ladling of guilt, a focus on sexual sins and a series of vague though predictable threats unless we all change our ways. It is the most appalling drivel, an insult to Our Lady who has, I’d imagine, a much more healthy approach to life and to her Son than this kind of nonsense gives her credit for.
What’s unusual about this publication, however, is that is has appended to it a recommendation from a bishop! As if, in these tumultuous times, any port is better than a storm on the high seas. God preserve us from our friends.
One of the limitations of traditional Catholic theology is that we tend to see things in black and white compartments. We tend, in our modern way, to package things, God himself included. Everything is in its own box; every formula contains the fullness of truth; every ritual has to follow a set rubrical line. We have, you might say, succeeded in containing God, domesticating God, reducing God to our level. This, I think, is what Woody Allen meant when he famously talked about how friendly he was with God: ‘We go on double dates together’.
In the process we have often lost, to a large degree, that sense of the mystery and majesty of God, that sense of wonder that helps us to realise that no formula, no ritual will ever do anything more than point us in the direction of a God who was unknown and is unknowable and yet, extraordinarily, beckons us to him in such a way that we find rumours of him everywhere.
This limitation can infect traditional Catholic spirituality as well. Sometimes we tend to set up a series of specific prayers we need to get through to give ourselves brownie points rather than, for example, to be still in the presence of God. Prayer, we can believe, is saying prayers rather than creating a space around us to let God be God. As if we can somehow phone God up and expect, unlike with a PP, more than an answering machine. Or as if praying before the Blessed Sacrament is better than just praying in a church or praying in a church is better than at home.
So we say Rosary after Rosary or we multiply particular devotions as we obsessively create an obstacle course for ourselves that we imagine will deliver on some particular intention. Prayer ends up as a compulsion rather than a restful presence, words rather than stillness and silence.
This compulsive form of praying, often an end in itself, can create a kind of spiritual naivete, a suggestiveness that encourages acceptance of all forms of nonsense. For instance, someone said to me the other day that the television is ‘the devil’s tabernacle’. Who told you that? I asked. ‘It’s in the messages’ was the reply. ‘What messages?’ The messages from Our Lady.
That such nonsense has become a new form of scripture is an indication of how badly we have lost our spiritual sense. Few seemed prepared to name that truth usually because such people are good people and are doing no harm. Not so, I believe, because apart from making a mockery of the Christian faith (though often unaware of that) they’re effectively drawing people away from a more authentic spirituality. Thomas Merton, the famous Mystic and writer on prayer was once asked by a group of contemplative nuns: how can we best help people to attain union with God? Merton’s response was that people were already united with God and that prayer was about becoming more conscious of that. In other words, God is with us all the time and everywhere. We don’t have to put ourselves through any series of hoops to get him to pay attention to us. The problem may be that we’re not paying attention to him, even though he’s listening!
Part of what we need to do is to get our heads around that simple truth – God is with us. Then, when we see through the eyes of faith, everything in life begins to look differently. As the writer Wilkie Collins puts it every bush becomes ‘a burning bush revealing God’s presence to us’. It’s what the poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when she wrote:
Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries. 

It often disturbs me when I find people multiplying rosaries as if, somehow, two rosaries are better than one, five decades better than one decade, or one decade better than one Our Father. When that happens prayer is reduced to plucking blackberries rather than trying to pick up the rumours of God forever swirling around us. That mathematical obsession at its best is an effort to manipulate God – and the best of luck with that. At its worst it’s a dismal effort to remind God that ‘he owes us one’.