#706 Why I Pray; My Journey Into the Power and Purpose of Prayer

What if the first ten minutes of your day decided the shape of your soul? We open with a simple practice—knees before the phone—and follow it into the deeper question beneath every search for meaning: why pray at all? Along the way, we travel from the noise of constant distraction to the quiet center where identity, desire, and purpose are forged, and we see how a small ritual can rewrite the way we love, work, and fight for what is good.

We share the heartbeat of Claymore Milites Christi, our Apostolate for young men. Through story and reflection, we explore how actions flow from the heart, how choosing the good reshapes the person, and how prayer fills what we later pour out. 

A moving reflection from James Van Der Beek reframes worth as gift, not achievement—“I am worthy of God’s love”—and becomes a doorway into the truth that love moves first. From there, we step into philosophy and poetry, letting beauty in the mountains and the words of C.S. Lewis widen our vision and break the spell of endless work and distraction.

If this resonates, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review to help others find the show. 

Eamil us for more information on Claymore: info@jp2renew.org

Transcript

Why Do I Pray

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Claymore Become Who You Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggert, your host. I'm glad you're joining me today. Today's going to be a uh uh look at I'm gonna say fun session. It's a deep session. It goes into the awe and wonder of prayer. I was asked, why do I pray? Why do I pray? This is my journey into the power and the purpose of prayer. And let me give you a little backstop on this. As you know, we've launched a Claymore, uh Militus Christie. Claymore Militus Christie is uh is our apostolate for young men, Gen Z men, and a little bit older than that. And we have a number of leaders that we're building up uh uh uh really across the nation. So if you're interested, there's an email in the show notes that will get to me. I get copied on that. So uh shoot me an email. We'll connect, and you can bring this into your parish, into uh your family, into your friends, into the people that surround you and bring some real gifts into their lives. When a man comes to Claymore Militus, Christy, he usually comes to us because he's a seeker. And what is he seeking? He's asking, what is the truth of things? What is the truth of things? You know, who am I? What's the purpose and meaning of my life? What about sex and sexuality? Why are we created male and female? What about happiness? What about joy? What about peace? And even more, what about love? Does truth itself and true love, do they even exist? Does God exist? So as Claymore, when they come to us and they're speaking to, say, a leader, there's always just two assets. It's very simple to get started. They commit to a 10-minute, what we call the Claymore morning ritual. This is before you look at that phone, you fall to your knees, and it's a prayer ritual. And sometimes these guys aren't praying. They go, Why do I pray? That's how this episode's coming about today when they ask me, Why do I pray? So that's the first thing we we ask them to do. It's in the Claymore uh battle plan outline, which I will uh put in the show notes. You can print that off. This will be under formation. Just this 10-minute morning ritual, knees before the phone. Why did they have to do that? I'll get into that in a minute. The second thing is just read one act, one short chapter, almost an article size from our uh Claymore Battle Plan Handbook. Now, the the handbook's being published in in uh about two weeks, if you're listening to this today. Uh, but we have these drafts, so we we can send these young guys who are working with the draft on the book, uh, so we don't even have to wait for it. But, anyways, that's all they have to do. And then they connect with one of us to to uh to discuss that act. There's QA that follows each act. There's 52 acts, one for each week of the year. It's amazing, amazing, amazing, right? And that's it. Boom. That's how simple it is to get started. Sometimes a man, though, doesn't pray, or he may be agnostic, and he just wants to start with the handbook. Hey, I want to get into the story. I want to, I want just more information. Explain to me what is the truth, what is love. And he thinks this. He says, you know, I haven't prayed before. Let me find out what this is all about. And then I'll I'll start to pray. But we explain to him that he's gonna never find what he's looking for. Simply put, he has an interior life and an exterior life, we all do. Well, his interior life, the life of the heart, is vast and deep. We don't really think about this sometimes. It's really sad. And everything that that young man encounters, any of us encounter on the outside, always has an effect on our interior life, right? In fact, how he reacts to his experience of the exterior life, you know, the people he meets, uh, the good or evil he comes into contact with, how he reacts to the world always flows first and primarily from his interior life to the outside. In fact, it's in his actions as what I do flowing from my interior life and then my actions in the world, I determine myself. In other words, if I do good, I become good. And you can say, I become good and I am good. I am good as a person. Now, if I go out in the world and my actions uh are evil, I become evil. I actually determine myself. I am evil as a person. So your actions in the world, flowing from your hearts, change the world around you, either for good or for evil. This is why the two asks that we have, the prayer comes first, because it's in prayer is what gets that man, all of us in touch with what? That deep place in the heart. And it's there in the depths of our hearts that we encounter God. In that deep place, we just find two people, ourselves and God. And it's here on the battlefield of the individual human heart. The battle between God and Satan for control of our hearts takes place. And I get to determine who wins, how? By the choices I make. It's amazing. We have free will, the awe and wonder of how we're created. Do I become a self-giving person, a person of love, or grasping, taking, lusting? Right? This is gonna determine who I become and who the world around me in some ways uh um become. I want to show you before I get into a little bit of a philosophical, uh, poetic way, because when you're talking about the for me, prayer is awe and wonder. I mean, if you're gonna meet you and God down deep, how where do the words come from? So a lot of times I turn to philosophy and and poetry in order to explain it. But I'll get to that in a minute. But first I want to show you a uh kind of a sad clip, but something that brings this out. It's a video clip of actor James uh Vanderbeek. This is such a handsome guy when he was young. He played in all these different uh uh movies and series and stuff, and he passed away just uh uh recently, right, from cancer, leaving his wife and and six uh children behind. So let me play that uh clip for you right now.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Today's my birthday, and it has been the hardest year of my life, and I wanted to share something that I learned with y'all. Um when I was younger, I used to define myself as an actor. Right. Which it was never really all that fulfilling. And then I became a husband, and that was much better. And then I became a father, and that was the ultimate. I could define myself then as a a loving, uh capable, strong, supportive husband, father, provider, steward of the land that we're so lucky to live on. And for a long time that felt like a really good definition to the question who who am I, what am I? And then this year, I had to look my own mortality in the eye. I had to come nose to nose with death. And all of those definitions that I cared so deeply about were stripped for me. I was away for treatment, so I could no longer be a husband that was helpful to my wife. I could no longer be a father who could pick up his kids and put them to bed and be there for them. I could not be a provider because I wasn't working. I couldn't even be a steward of a land because at times I was too weak to prune all the trees during the window that you're supposed to prune them. And so I was faced with the question: if I am just a too skinny, weak guy alone in an apartment with cancer, what am I? And I meditated and the answer came through, I am worthy of God's love. Simply because I exist. And if I'm worthy of God's love, shouldn't I also be worthy of my own? And the same is true for you. And as I move through this healing portal toward recovery, I wanted to share that with you because I think that revelation that came to me was due in no small part to all the prayers and the love that had been directed toward me. So I I offer that to you. However, it sits in your consciousness, however it resonates, run with it. And if the word God trips you up, um I certainly don't know what God is or explain God. Uh my efforts to connect to God are an ongoing process that is a constant unfolding mystery to me. But if it's a trigger, it feels too religious, you can take the word God out, and your mantra can simply be, I am worthy of love.

Prayer As Human And Natural

Work, Distraction, And The Search For Truth

Mountains, Beauty, And Awakening To Prayer

Humility, Knees Before The Phone

Thirst At The Well And Living Water

Final Blessing And Claymore Resources

SPEAKER_01 8:48

So that's that's touching, isn't it? Here's a man who just passed away, who was struggling with cancer, who ends up going into treatment, leaving his wife and his family, struggling in a hotel room by himself while he's getting treatment, and discovering who he is. Now, when you go down deep into the heart, and and this is a good thing for young men, and that's what I said, sometimes they're agnostic, they haven't prayed for a while, just get down to your heart and you're going to touch something. See, he was touched um by God. And and again, I think he's just saying to young guys or to anyone that's listening that if you if you don't want to use the God word, you know, talk about love, you know, that you are loved. Ultimately, what you're gonna find, what I'm gonna get into right now, is that that it there has to be a God out there, a being who is love. God is love. And this is what we know from scripture, right? God is love. It's not that we love God, but that God loved us first. And that's why uh James can say, I am someone that is to be loved. This is what he's feeling in his heart. He's feeling this love. Unless he was given this love, he wouldn't be able to express this. This is very important for us to remember. Unless God loved us first, you know, we we wouldn't have this, he wouldn't be in touch with his heart like this. He wouldn't be expressing this to you. So again, why do I pray? And my journey into the power of prayer. So, first of all, I pray because I'm human. I pray because I'm human. That's what James was uh just expressing there. This is just an outflow of who we are. It's very important to, like he said, to meditate on that. And so I'm gonna start this way. In a dream, I found myself one time before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and I've heard a voice say, Do good and avoid evil. The temptations I had been fighting for weeks suddenly found a weak place in my armor, joined by the modern echo of the serpent's ancient lie. You certainly will not die, your eyes will be open, and you will be like gods, and you can decide what is good and what is evil. Well, just as I was about to cave to this temptation, I began to pray. And a warm yet piercing light, which I later understood to be grace, broke through. My reason awakened, my will was fortified. I looked again at that weathered tree and I smiled, and I chose God. I chose God. See, prayer is natural to the human person, as natural as breathing, eating, sleeping, and loving. For philosophers and poets and ordinary men like me, or maybe you. We're not ordinary, we're all extraordinary, just like James was saying. Well, prayer opens us up to what? To the awe and wonder of all that's true, good, and beautiful. It opens us up the human person, the human heart, body and soul to the infusion of grace, the gift of divine life and love. That gift becomes efficacious only when it's received and then acted upon, when a man becomes a sincere gift to others. This is how the city of God is built. This is how the body of Christ grows. This is the meaning of our lives. The man who does not pray closes himself to that gift because I cannot give what I don't have. I have to be filled first, and then I bring this good into the world. Otherwise, I become like a cut flower, separated from the source of life, grasping desperately at the finite, at finite things around me, trying to attempt to replace the infinite in my heart. Well, sin shrinks this vision of ours. Desire becomes distorted and twisted, and the heart grows ravenous, hungry for lust, it becomes a heart of lust. We see this all around us. Human beings begin trying to build cities on the foundation of sand, huh? Just shifting, blown around by the spirits of the AIDS. They never are satisfying. The human heart was made for more. That's why I pray. The reason, however, while the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this. Both are concerned with the marvelous. Saint Thomas Aquinas. Let me say that again for you. The reason why the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this. They're both concerned with the marvelous. My friend Jimmy Patridge returned from Vietnam without his legs. The sexual revolution was roaring. Abortion was legalized. No fault divorce hollowed out families. I watched marriages collapse. I saw what divorce did to friends of mine. Later came the abuse scandals in the church and a growing distrust of government and institutions. At 17, the oldest of five boys, I felt boxed in and restless. After school, I began working from three to eleven, an eight-hour shift as an apprentice chef in a hotel kitchen. My family needed the money, and besides, the world of work brought me a sense of satisfaction and an escape from my troubled mind. Still, the question haunted me. Is this all there is? War, sex without love, marriage that dissolves, labor to survive, work to distract. Well, an interest in philosophy led me to Joseph Pieper. And he wrote this, more and more at the present time, the world of work and its distractions is becoming our entire world. It threatens to engulf us completely till at last they make a total claim upon the whole of human nature, a world in which there's no room for philosophy or philosophying in any true sense of the world, word. What he's saying is we get so distracted, we don't go into the inner heart, right? We never think get a chance to ask those big questions. What is true? What is real? What is beautiful? Plato, as everyone knows, virtually identified philosophy and Eros, this innate, almost sensual desire, but it's for all that's true, good, and beautiful. And in regard to the uh similarity of philosophy and poetry, there's this little known and curious saying of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which occurs in his commentary on the metaphysics metaphysics of Aristotle, who was a great philosopher, like with contemporary of Plato's. And there, Aristotle says that philosophy is related to poetry and to the poet in which way? Both are concerned with wonder, with marveling, and with that that makes us marvel. Then John Paul II took that and even deepened it. He said the lessons of history show that there's a path to follow. It is necessary not to abandon the passion for ultimate truth, the eagerness to search for it, or the audacity to forge new paths in the search. It is faith which stirs reason to move beyond all isolation and willing willingly to run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good, and true. Faith thus becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason. Our reason, you see it today, our reason should seek the truth. But without faith, our reason becomes very unreasonable. Well, as I was reading that, that was enough for me. I thought if truth existed, I needed space to find it. I need to get the distractions out of my life. This is what prayer is. I left home with almost nothing. A backpack, boots, a bicycle, a few clothes, an old station wagon pointed west, and I headed toward Denver to be near the mountains, hoping to breathe again. And I remember reading in the Song of Songs, it's so beautiful. And this is God. God attracting me. Why did I want to go out there? Why did I even want to go out to the mountains? Why did I need space? Why do we pray? God is the one pulling us into this. We were created for this. And in the song of songs, we read, now this these are two lovers in the song of songs. But the mystics and and the saints wrote more about that because this is a vocabulary that they had with God also. So his the lover in here is God Himself that we're watching, who's looking for us too. So we in the Song of Songs we hear this, and this is a erotic love poetry from the Bible. Hark, my lover, here he comes, springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills. My lover is like a gazille or a young stag. My lover speaks. He says to me, Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one, and come, as from Psalms chapter two, verses eight to ten. Well, one day, hiking in the Rocky Mountains, I followed a steep animal trail into the trees until I came above the tree line. A little further, a lone tree I saw. It was near the ridge, and I headed toward it. There I stood in awe and wonder at the scene before me. Across a deep valley stood a majestic snow capped mountain on the other side, and casking cascading down from its summit was like liquid silver. It was a waterfall dropping thousands of feet below. The song of birds was in the air, bees and butterflies drifted through the wildflowers, elk grazed in the valley below, and their calves were leaping around beside them. I slid off my backpack and I sat against that tree to take it all in. I didn't find all the answers to my questions that day, but I sensed that the awe, wonder, and beauty before me opened a door that I was invited to enter. I sat there and I began to pray. Almost immediately the small circle of my world where I took up so much space became much larger. I became smaller not because I shrunk, but because I was given sight and my circle extended outward. I had been trying to find the truth in my small circle that had me in the center. I was living in a small, cramped eternity. What I needed were not new arguments as much as to give it ear. Prayer like a branch reconnected to the vine, opened the story of my smaller life, my smaller circle to the awe and wonder of the larger story so they could connect. C.S. Lewis said it like this, we want something so much more. Something the books on aesthetics take little notice of, but the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want to merely see beauty, though God knows even that's bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words. To be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it and become part of it. That's C.S. Lewis in the weight of glory. That is why I pray. Prayer is an aspiration of the heart. It's a simple glance directed to heaven. It is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial as well as joy. Finally, it's something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus, said Therese of Lesoux in her story of a soul. Saint John Damascus said, prayer is the raising of one's mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God. But when we pray, do we speak from the heights of our pride and self-will? Or do we get down on our knees like we do with Claymore men before we look at the phone? That's why we we go down to our knees. We humble ourselves, because in doing so we open ourselves up to the one who humbled himself on the cross. Or do we stay in that pride and self-will? What does this Psalm say? Out of the depths of a humble and contrite heart we cry. Jesus teaches us clearly, he who humbles himself will be exalted. See, humility is the very foundation of prayer, because it's only when we humbly acknowledge that we do not know how to pray from Romans are we truly open to receive this gift of prayer, freely bestowed by God. God wants to give this to us, but we have to be open to receive it. See, in this posture of dependence, we approach him, not as those who demand or presume, but as those who simply open our hands to receive what he longs to give us. St. Augustine said it so beautifully. He said, Man is a beggar before God. In prayer, we come empty-handed, recognizing our poverty and our need. And it's precisely in this humble poverty that God meets us, exalting the lonely and filling the hungry with good things. Finally, prayer is the place where God's thirst for you meets your thirst for God. In the Cospel of John, there's a Samaritan woman who comes to the well to draw water. Jesus says to her, Give me a drink. Jesus says to her, Can you imagine? Give me a drink. Jesus is thirsty. You know, in John chapter 4, you can read that Samaritan woman at the well. And Jesus says to her, If you knew the gift of God standing before Before you, you would ask me for a drink, and I would fill you with eternal water. You'd never have to you'd never be thirsty again. The wonder of prayer is revealed beside the well. When we come seeking water, there Christ comes to meet every human being. It is he who first seeks and asks us for a drink. Jesus thirsts for us. His asking arises from the depths of God's desire for you and me, whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God's thirst for us. This is why it's deep in the heart where you find these two people, huh? If you knew the gift of God and who it is that's saying to you, give me a drink, Jesus said to her, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. Paradoxically, our prayer or petition is a response to the plea of the living God who says, They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and tried to hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Prayer is the response of faith to the free promise of salvation, and also the response of love to the thirst of the only Son of God. This is why I pray. Hey, God bless you. Download the Claymore Battle Plan outline. You can find it on our website. I'll put a link in the show notes. Don't forget to subscribe, share this with people. Get ready that the Claymore handbook is coming out pretty soon. And again, just a reminder to you if you're interested, we're doing weekly calls with these Claymore leaders. They're incredible men that are that as soon as that handbook comes out, uh, we have a plan that we can help so many, many others. So many of these young uh men have questions and they're looking for something. And it's our job to go out into the world, huh? It's the salvation of souls. It's a crazy world, crazy time, and they're looking for answers. Uh, let's help them find those answers. Hey, God bless you. Thanks, everyone. Keep me in your prayers, and I'll keep you in mind.