Originally posted by RBerman
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If I'm reading you right the preference from your point of view is that we ask only other 'living saints', or mostly. Would you be okay with someone asking St Paul to pray for him?
Whenever I'm in a prayer group, or I talk to devout friends, we reassure each other that we'll be praying and we tell about each others the intentions. So in that sense I'm not sure how much more frequently I can ask for prayer from other Christians, without making it an intrusive business.
Prayers to the saints can happen anywhere and at any time, so for that reason alone I end up praying to them more often. And there's so many of them to address, and on earth there's only so many social engagements you get into. And I can reflect on their lives. Take Saint Maria Goretti who died a martyr-virgin, calling out to her attacker not to do it because it would be a sin against God and she didn't want him to go to Hell, she's often call to pray for the sake of chastity.
However since one is not done to the exclusion of the other, I don't see what problem you could have even if 99% of my requests for prayer were to the saints.
2) Compared to both of those, how often do you speak directly to God?
I think I'll try to give an short account of the prayer life I've been having, then you can judge for yourself. This is just a dry content listing, and sometimes things are different.
In my prayer life I tend to address God first if its a spontaneous prayer, and then perhaps a saint or two if appropriate. If I'm approaching the tabernacle I tend to visit an icon of Maria first and pray to her (not to the icon its just there as an aid to prayer), about being ready to be before her Son's human presence and have only Him on my mind there. When there I spend the time quiet silent prayer to Christ for at least ten or twenty minutes.
If I'm praying the Rosary at the tabernacle with my friends, we tend to close it with calling upon the saints before the final prayer "Saint Joseph, pray for us; Saint Ansgar, pray for us; Saint Maximillian Kolbe, pray for us; Saint Agnes, pray for us; Saint Maria Goretti, pray for us..." Closing off with first a prayer to Mary (First Salve Regina, closed off with 'Pray for us Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ') and then asking God that he would make us imitate what the Rosary is talking about and achieve its promises.
However the Rosary is a meditative prayer on the life of Christ's life, death and resurrection, there's ritual morning and evening prayers and those are addressed directly to God. Then there's the Divine Office which again is solely God, you pray/sing the Psalms from the bible along with various other prayers to God.
I haven't made a count, but I hope you can respect that its not clear cut. If you counted up the number of Hail Mary's it would dominate the list simple because of the Rosary. However that assumes that all prayers are equally important, and its the number of times said that marks it as important.
In the Rosary each Hail Mary is typically accompanied by a reflection on a gospel account, you can see an example of doing that here. However I would never do that with the Our Father, where each individual line of the prayer is its own mini-prayer. "Our Father who art in Heaven", you instantly think of God and His most supreme nature and the division of this world from that of His at the moment; "Hallowed be thy name", how do I make God's name holy or how can I fail to respect it? "Thy Kingdom Come", resurrection, judgement; "Thy Will be Done", Gethsemany, obedience, the supremacy of God... I would never want to recall on anything other than these things during the Our Father.
With the Hail Mary instead I can place myself standing with Mary (the first, most humble, most faithful, most Christ loving and most obedient Christian by our reckoning) considering these events of Christ's time on earth.
I know I pray a lot more than when I was a protestant, even if you took out all the prayers to the saints and just focused on prayers to God.
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