Liturgical Prayer, Rite, and Gesture

What's Your Next Step? Pray with Your Body

One of the distinctive things about Catholic worship is that it invites us to attend with our whole selves. At Mass, we present our thoughts, our feelings, and our bodies to God as one communal and eucharistic act of worship. This, of course, can be difficult. Our thoughts can wander. Our feelings can be flat and diffuse. We can find it hard to be present. 

• As psychologists and scientists of human cognition have been telling us lately, our attention is a finite and conditioned resource. The ability to focus and be present is more like a skill or a muscle than it is like an on/off switch. Take a minute to evaluate your own attention. What thoughts, feelings, and demands tend to occupy it? How easily can you focus on a single thing at a time? Where are you most readily able to pay attention? When are you most distracted?

Fortunately, we are creatures of body and spirit. Since what we do with our bodies affects our thinking and our feelings (and vice versa), the various gestures and stances of the Mass can help us to maintain a sense of being present. Each stance we utilize while we worship embodies a distinct purpose, a particular motivation. 

• Take another minute and consider the three most common positions we adopt during the Mass: sitting, standing, and kneeling. If you're able, spend a moment in each position. Feel what your body is doing. Where are its points of contact on the floor? What is the position of your body saying as you stand, sit, or kneel?

Using the body to center the mind and heart is a method that reaches back throughout religious history, Christian and otherwise. The contemporary popularity of practices like yoga or tai chi (themselves aspects of specific religious traditions) are evidence that many people seek more than a religion of thinking and feeling -- they want something that pertains to the whole self. 

• Take a final minute and reflect on your experience of Catholicism thus far. Have you encountered it as an embodied faith? Primarily a religion of the mind? Or the feelings? How does this compare to your past religious experience? What are some ways in which you can better incorporate your body into your practice of prayer?