I was on the radio this morning, as I often am when there's a new book coming out - I end up doing a lot of Catholic radio, especially the morning drive shows. So today I was on in Iowa - 8:15 am for me, 7:15 for them.

The host of the radio show was asking me about my next book, Praying the Psalms: The Divine Gateway to Lectio Divina and Contemplative Prayer, coming out in November. And he said something interesting - he said that he thought contemplative prayer was the most important kind of prayer (or something like that). And I found myself gently correcting him, saying that while contemplative prayer is a beautiful form of prayer, it is an advanced prayer, and as the mystics will tell us, it's not for everyone. Some people never get to this advanced form of prayer, and that's ok. And what I didn't say, is that in my next book, coming out in the spring, Praying Like the Early Church - one of the first things I point out is that in reality, the most important prayer is the prayer that most of us will never pray ourselves, we will only ever say Amen to is - that is, the Eucharistic prayer.

So, yes, contemplative prayer is great, if you are called to that. But the truth is - and I think I can speak for the Church fathers here - if it was a choice between just going to Mass or being a contemplative and skipping Mass, God would rather have us just go to Mass. There is nothing wrong with being a "basic" Christian who regularly attends worship, but who does not become a contemplative. And being a contemplative is great, but it's not for everyone, and it certainly cannot replace the Eucharist. It all begins with receiving Christ in the Eucharist. After that, all that the earliest Christians were expected to do was to pray the Our Father three times a day. As I explain in my book, the very idea of personal devotion, or private prayer, takes a while to develop, but the prayers that are most important from the very beginning are the ones that Jesus taught/instituted - the Our Father and the Eucharist.