There are three types of prayer.

VOCAL PRAYER

Vocal prayer is prayer expressed in words. This includes the Eucharist, the rosary, prayer before meals, novenas, etc. For prayer to be effective you need to focus your mind and heart during prayer. Every prayer has some merit, but if we want to grow in prayer and want our prayers to be effective we need to keep improving on our prayer. To think about what we are praying and make the prayer our own. In other words, to pray in our hearts. If we follow the right prayer advice, prayer will naturally become a prayer of the heart. As with all these stages we will provide more detailed advice of how to pray and grow into each of the prayer types themselves since each has its own dynamics and focus. 

MEDITATION

Meditation or mental prayer is conversation with God. It starts by listening to God, which could be through nature, the lives of the saints, scripture, but is best through the Gospels where we can encounter Jesus himself. There is some kind of response or interaction with God which can take on a myriad of forms and grows as we draw more of ourselves into the encounter and live it the wisdom and grace we receive. Usually there is a fair amount of reflecting on the focus of our prayer but as it grows our heart is drawn in more and transformed.

CONTEMPLATION

The word contemplation can be used many different ways when it comes to prayer. In the Catholic Church there are different and complementary ways to understand the prayer journey and each has particular ways of explaining prayer. We will follow what's called the 'Carmelite tradition' primarily since the two greatest teachers of prayer in the Catholic Church come from this tradition, St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, both members of the Carmelite order and both have been given the titles Doctor of the Church, of which there are only 35 out of over 10000 saints. Their expertise is prayer and God gave each of them the special gift to be able to explain all the stages of prayer. They use the word contemplation to mean a special supernatural grace of prayer where God starts to work directly in the soul to transform it. When you hug someone you love, you can feel the inner warmth of love within you. This is a bit like this experience of contemplation. The soul becomes aware of God's gentle presence and that the soul is starting to become captured by this love. There are many stages to this kind of prayer which include profound experiences of God's love. St John of the Cross is very clear that wants everyone to experience this kind of prayer, but it is up to us to cooperate with God's grace to allow us to make that journey. It is the aim of this guide to facilitate that journey.