As the year winds down, I’m finishing the podcasts of the Catechism in a Year from Ascension Press. It’s been a struggle to get through, but worth it. The sources that the Catechism drew from are wide and wonderful, and offer new reading material. Parts of the Catechism are like poetry, and parts are a bit dry. I strongly suspect that this is different authors, but I don’t know enough detail about how it was written. One very dry part was the section on the Ten Commandments, and all the ways you can break them that you never thought of. Exhausting.
Then we got to the last section on prayer.
Oh. My.
Three statements in particular stuck in my mind.

1) … we cannot pray “at all times” if we do not pray at specific times.

2)… vocal prayer becomes an initial form of contemplative prayer…

3) Prayer Is A Battle

The section on prayer begins…
“Prayer is the life of the new heart. … traditions insist that prayer is a remembrance of God often awakened by the memory of the heart. We must remember God more often than we draw breath. But we cannot pray ‘at all times’ if we do not pray at specific times.… (2697) This is a direct and simple comment on how to deepen prayer. Start by doing the simple thing. It reminds me of when I taught math. Children who didn’t memorize their fractions find it incredibly difficult to grasp geometry.
Next, “The Lord leads all persons … and each believer responds according to his heart’s resolve and the personal expressions of his prayer.” (2699) 

Prayer is internalized to the extent that we become aware of him “to whom we speak;” Thus vocal prayer becomes an initial form of contemplative prayer. 2704

What? I always thought there were three kinds of prayer: vocal, meditative, and contemplative, and that they were given in the order of difficulty. Contemplation was for highly advanced people and came after meditation. This section of the Catechism says plainly that contemplation is a part of prayer for anyone right from the start. Further, it says that contemplation is always possible even when we cannot meditate.
The Catechism then discusses all the different aids to meditation, mostly lots of different kinds of books, plus nature, plus … “To meditate on what we read helps us to make it our own by confronting it with ourselves. Here, another book is opened: the book of life.” (2706) Don’t be like the seed that falls on the path or in the bushes or in barren ground. (2707) Meditation engages thought, imagination, emotion, and desire. (2708)
St. Teresa says, ”Contemplative prayer … is nothing else than a close sharing between friends…” This of course is why it is available even to a beginner. (2709) “The choice of … prayer arises from a determined will …One … makes time for the Lord, with the firm determination not to give up… One cannot always meditate, but one can always enter into inner prayer … the heart is the place of this quest …” (2710) In prayer we “gather up the heart’ and “recollect ourselves” in order to make an offering to Our Lord.

Calling prayer a battle is not something I ever thought of and yet, obvious, once said. Even Father Mike, the guy doing the podcast, says he thought, at the beginning of his deeper prayer life, that all the distractions and struggles were what came before prayer, in order to get to the “warm bath” of prayer itself.

The Catechism says, that particular battle IS prayer.

(More Highlights with attached Paragraph numbers.)
Prayer Is A Battle. The battle is against ourselves first and then against the tempter “who does all he can to turn” us away from continuing to pray and thereby uniting ourselves with God. Prayer is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part. (2725)

I got a kick out of the list of “erroneous notions of prayer.” These include “a simple psychological activity,” “an effort of concentration to reach a mental void,” “ritual words and postures.” “Many Christians unconsciously regard prayer as an occupation that is incompatible with all the other things they have to do: they “don’t have the time.” (2726)
“Christian prayer is neither an escape from reality nor a divorce from life.” (2727)
“Failure in prayer stems from discouragement, sadness, disappointment, wounded pride, resistance.” (2728)

“The habitual difficulty in prayer is distraction.To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap… Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve.” (2729) I find this comment so important and appealing when thinking about the Battle of Prayer.

“…the battle against the possessive and dominating self requires vigilance …” This paragraph includes a reference to the bridegroom coming in the middle of the night and the virgins’ lamps are the light of faith. (2730)

“Dryness belongs to contemplative prayer when the heart is separated from God, with no taste for thoughts, memories, and feelings, even spiritual ones. …. If dryness is due to the lack of roots, because the word has fallen on rocky soil, the battle requires conversion.” (2731)

“The most common, yet most hidden, temptation is our lack of faith. It expresses itself less by declared incredulity than by our actual preferences.When we begin to pray, a thousand labors or cares thought to be urgent vie for priority…” (2732)

Acedia And of course sloth rises up to keep us down. But this thought isn’t new to me… (2733)