There is an idea among some people that our prayer is meant to evolve with time. They think that while we all start with vocal prayer (made with words either aloud or silently), we are meant, as we grow up, to use fewer words, to move on to mental prayer or meditation, and eventually move beyond that and learn pure contemplative prayer, where we are silent both without and within. Some authors speak as if the silence of contemplation were the only true prayer. And yet one of the Church’s greatest mystics, St Theresa of Avila, spent her day, in between periods of contemplation, reciting the words of the psalms of the Divine Office with her fellow sisters. Mental and contemplative prayer are certainly forms of prayer we only learn about when we are older, but vocal prayer cannot be something that we are meant to grow out of. When the Apostles asked Our Lord to teach them to pray, he told them: ‘Pray like this: Our Father, who art in heaven…’ (Matthew 6:9) He taught them, in the first place, the words of a prayer.

Catholic interest in the Mass (which is certainly a good thing) also seems to have eclipsed our interest in other prayers, so that the only prayer book most people might own is a missal. And many other books of prayers have little space for other devotions, because so much space is given to the text of the Mass.

There haven’t been so many books of prayers printed in recent decades. When we look back a hundred years, we find a combination of factors led to a golden age of prayer books for ordinary people. I remember inheriting my grandfather’s prayer book from 1959, and feeling that I had discovered a hidden treasure. While freedom in choosing how to pray is essential, sometimes we do need someone to teach us, like Our Lord: ‘Pray like this. Say these prayers.’ And that’s what I found in that prayer book of my grandfather. Many of the prayers in our new prayer book (pretty much the entire collection of night prayers) come straight from that old prayer book. And many other collections have been plundered for their treasures too, together with a handful of newly adapted or translated texts.

But that is only meant to be a starting point. It is a wonderful thing to build up — committing to memory or even to paper — our own collection of favourite prayers: from the scriptures, from the writings of the saints, from the prayers of the Church. Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh writes in School for Prayer:

Mark these passages that go deep into your heart, that move you deeply, that makes sense, that express something which is already within your experience, either of sin, or of bliss in God, or of struggle. Learn those passages, because one day when you are so completely low, so profoundly desperate that you cannot call out of your soul any spontaneous expression, any spontaneous wording, you will discover that these words come up and offer themselves to you as a gift of God, as a gift of the Church, as a gift of holiness, helping our simple lack of strength. And then you really need the prayers you have learnt and made a part of yourself.

We don’t always find time to think about the words of our prayers as much as we might like. Ideally, we would spend some time thinking about not just what our prayer says to God, but also what it says to us about him and about ourselves in relation to him. St Philip used to teach people to take the Our Father slowly, word by word, phrase by phrase, and draw out all the ideas it contains. We don’t have time to do that every time we say it though. And so when we do rush through it in a few seconds, we mean implicitly whatever it was Christ meant when he gave it to his disciples and asked them to hand it down to us. And we intend to say to God all the ideas that would come to mind, if we did have a bit more time to think about it.

Similarly, when our prayer has been composed by a saint, we can be confident that the thoughts those words express — even if we don’t always have time to explore them — led the author to an even closer union with God.

We might think that we can compose better prayers in our own words than some of these old prayers, and that might even be true. Some part of our time of prayer can and should involve speaking to God in our own words. But there is something special about joining in a prayer that has been in use even from before we were born, that has been sanctified by centuries of use. When we use a prayer that is shared with the rest of the Church, we are reminded that we don’t just pray by ourselves. We imply not only all those ideas we might find in it, but we attach to it also all those intentions that our brothers and sisters in the Church, throughout the world, throughout time, have meant and do mean and ever will mean in their use of the same prayer. And it is a comforting thought to imagine all the saints — past, present and future — praying with us and for us in those same words.

St Luke’s description of the scene of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and the supper which they shared with our Lord is, I think, one of the most beautiful and powerful in his Gospel. It shows what a true artist the Evangelist was — and his words have served as an inspiration to some of the world’s most gifted artists, such as Valasquez, Caravaggio and Rubens, each painter lending his talents to give us his own interpretation of the moment the two disciples ‘recognised him in the breaking of bread.’

I recently discovered the portrayal of this scene by another artist, Jean-Marie Pirot (1926–2018) who worked under the name Arcabas. His representation in the church of St Hugues-de-Chartreuse, France, was used by Bishop Erik Varden on the cover of his excellent book The Shattering of Loneliness, which I strongly recommend to those looking for their next spiritual book. The Cistercian bishop writes of the picture: ‘The mood is of friendship. It draws the spectator in, hospitably. The pilgrims talk among themselves. Christ is pensively silent, unimposing. But it is he who lends the picture warmth. He knows that his companions need to talk before they can listen. They are caught up in what they have been through.’ And he is quite right. The two figures seem hardly to notice their guest, as they are obviously rehearsing, yet again, the fiasco of the past few days in Jerusalem, when their friend whom they called Master was taken and summarily executed by the Roman authorities at the behest of the Chief Priests and the Pharisees. The rest of the group had fled, leaving the whole movement in disarray. That was why they were putting as much distance between themselves and the Holy City. It was too dangerous, frightening and, besides, their hopes of the new Messianic kingdom now lay in tatters. It was over. What was there to stay for?

The picture shows the two disciples, Cleopas and his anonymous companion, deep in conversation, each holding a large glass of wine. Beside them sits Jesus, just about to change everything once again. He is holding in his hands a hunk of bread and is clearly about to break it for them, the action that will enable them to recognise his presence with them and to see what they had already been told by some of the women who had visited the empty tomb in the morning, but whose testimony they had clearly either rejected or misunderstood. ‘God,’ says Varden, ‘remembers us before we remember God. Christ seeks the wanderers out when they, for their part, have despaired of finding him. He hears their anguish as a silent call. In a moment, he will hold the bread of mourning up as a Eucharistic host.’

He goes on to make a further observation: ‘Behind the pilgrim on the right sits a fourth person, whose profile is concealed. I take that to be me — or you. We are invited to sit down and share our story, assured that we have never been out of God’s mind. The old has passed. The new has come. There is a golden shimmer of glory to things.’

I like that idea of our entering into the story too. And since it isn’t about one of the Apostles — it’s not about Peter or Thomas, but two unknown disciples, Cleopas and A.N. Other — it makes it a little easier for us to read ourselves into the story, whether as pilgrims or escapees, in a muddle, confused, disillusioned, disappointed, hopeless, angry…whatever we are feeling. Imagine we are on the way to Emmaus, running away, and then astonished, delighted even, to be found by God, who has gone in search of us. Luke uses this same effect in the parable of the Lost Son and elsewhere. It is something to hang on to when we, like Cleopas and his companion, feel disconsolate and discouraged by the difficulties and twists of life, and when we are feeling most turned in ourselves or just feeling sorry for ourselves, that we can sense the attentive and compassionate presence of Christ, who has fallen in beside us and is walking with us, quietly on the road.

The liturgies of Holy Week and Easter are incredibly rich and moving, helping us to enter more deeply into the mysteries of the Lord’s Passion and Death and to be filled, once again, with the joy of his Resurrection. But we will all have experienced that what goes on in church doesn’t always correspond to how we are feeling or what we are thinking at our particular point in life’s journey. There are times when we are required to say the De profundis psalm when we are actually feeling rather happy. And then there are times when the circumstances of our own lives can make it very difficult for us to sing the Easter Alleluia, overcome with Paschal joy. We might identify with the disciples locking themselves in the upper room out of fear, and not so much with “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad!” We can find ourselves being plagued by all sorts of trials in the Easter season as much as in any other season. Even though we are an Easter people, we never stop being a Good Friday people also, at least this side of eternity. We can find it hard to believe in the ultimate triumph of life over death, of joy over sadness, of glory over suffering, especially during those times in our lives when we feel sad and lifeless, when we are anxious or hopeless or are grieving.

St Thomas the Apostle is therefore a very consoling example for us. When the other Apostles give him the good news of Easter, “We have seen the Lord”, that message did not resonate with him in any way. The darkness of Good Friday was still too real for him and prevented him from being moved by their news. His own experience did not allow him to believe that life had triumphed over death, that the crucified Jesus was now the risen Lord. Thomas stood in the light of Easter, yet that light did not dispel his darkness. In his doubting, Thomas is like so many Christians today. Many of us are surely distressed by the doubts we have, troubled by our sense that the light of Easter does not seem to have penetrated our lives very much, that Easter Sunday really hasn’t changed anything at all.

The Lord understands a doubting, questioning, troubled faith. When Jesus appeared to Thomas, he did not tell him off. His first words were, “Peace be with you”. He invited Thomas to touch his wounds as he had demanded, and then called on him to “doubt no longer but believe”. The gospel does not tell us that Thomas actually put his finger into the wounds in Christ’s hands and side. Seeing the Lord was enough: “My Lord and my God”.

Thomas, like the other disciples, saw and believed. However, Jesus knew that only a small group of disciples will see and believe, and so he blessed those many future disciples who believe without seeing. That blessing is on all of us who calls ourselves Christians and try to follow the Lord. As St Peter puts it, “You did not see him, yet you love him”. The Church is the community of those who believe in and love the Lord, without having seen him in the way Thomas and the other eyewitnesses did — those Apostles and disciples who are the foundations of our faith. We look forward to that day when we will see the Lord face-to-face in his kingdom. And because we do not yet see him face-to-face, our faith is always a faith that hopes.

Because we only live in hope of meeting the Lord like Thomas, there will always be some element of doubt in our own faith. As St Paul tells the Corinthians, “now we see as in a mirror, dimly”. Questions and doubts are an inevitable part of seeing dimly. Such questions and doubts are not an enemy of faith. They can lead, rather, to a deepening of our faith. If we face our doubts and our questions honestly, like St Thomas, and bring them to each other and to the Lord, we too can reach a point where we can make Thomas’ confession our own, “My Lord and my God”. We must all learn to seek the Lord with humility, sincerity and honesty, just as Doubting Thomas did, but to seek in hope, knowing that if we remain true to that search, true to the path, the Lord has his own ways to meet each one of us and to invite us, as he invited St Thomas, “Doubt no longer but believe”. Our doubts and our fears — even our sins and our failings — so often seem to us to lock the Lord out. But Jesus will always pass through the walls and doors we put up to meet us — in those doubts and worries — and to give us the peace of his presence.