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I was in my 40s before I completed a novena — nine days of prayer for an intention. I started many, and would invariably wind up forgetting after day one, doing several prayers to catch up on day five, then forget again.
It was only when I had unforgettably urgent things to pray for that I was finally motivated enough to finish my first novena. Since then, I have been in the middle of one novena or another (sometimes multiple) nearly every day. So at the risk of being redundant or repetitive (though both are entirely appropriate in an article about novenas) here are my nine reasons I love novenas:
1: Scripture proposes the first novena as a model for prayer.
The original novena was the one that lasted from the Ascension to Pentecost in the Upper Room, and it became the first act of the Catholic Church to gather Christians around the Blessed Mother who “devoted themselves with one accord to prayer.”
2: Popular novenas connect us to other Christians across time and space.
Novenas which have been prayed over hundreds of years include the St. Andrew’s Christmas Novena, and Las Posadas in Latin America. Newer novenas are being prayed simultaneously in Catholic nations worldwide, such as the St. Thérèse Novena. The Divine Mercy Novena is helping redefine the time between Good Friday and the Octave of Easter.
This means that novenas are helping us unite as Catholics and once more “devote ourselves with one accord to prayer.”
3: Novenas are repetitive — just like God.
When we repeat the same thing day after day, we are doing what God does every day. As Chesterton put it in his book Orthodoxy, “Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun, and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon.”
4: Repeating makes our requests more emphatic.
“The Hebrew language does not possess comparatives, such as ‘good, better, best,’ and so it uses repetition to communicate emphasis,” Tim Gray and Jeff Cavins explain in their book Walking With God.
When we pray in the Mass, “Holy, holy, holy” this is the Hebrew way of saying “very very holy.” In the same way, when we pray in the same way for nine days, we are saying “please, please, please,” three times.
5: Novenas teach perseverance, which is a key to prayer.
In Luke, “Jesus told them a parable about the need to pray at all times and not lose heart.” And in Matthew, when he says, “Seek and you shall find,” the verbs mean “keep seeking, and you shall find.”
When we pray, Jesus doesn’t just want us to ask, he wants us to ask again and again — nine times, for instance.
6: Novenas build obedience.
For us it’s the opposite, but for God, obedience is far greater than novelty.
One place to see this is in the story of Naaman’s healing by Elisha in the Old Testament. The king wants to do something novel and exciting to obtain a cure from the prophet; but the prophet tells him simply to wash in the Jordan River seven times.
In our spiritual lives, God also wants us to obey simple practices — such as novenas — rather than seek spiritually novel and exciting practices.
7: Novenas build humility.
It seems simple — simplistic, even — to expect God to respond to a prayer simply because it is posed in a certain way, repeatedly. In fact, it is very much a child’s strategy: If you get a No, ask again.
But of course, Jesus endorses using childlike strategies when he says “unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
8: Novenas call us to prayer each day.
Once you get into the novena habit, novenas can change your prayer life. I’ve personally found that a novena calls me to prayer with an urgency I don’t otherwise have. When I make a commitment to pray a novena for a friend, family member or other significant suffering, it is harder for me to skip prayer.
9: Above all: Novenas work.
I use John-Paul and Annie Deddens’ Pray More Novenas, and the prayers that the site’s emails provide are careful to help the petitioner understand that we have to embrace God’s will, rather than expecting him to embrace ours.
But I have seen remarkable answers to novena prayers: Petitions for family and friends and personal issues have been answered in remarkable ways.
