Scottish Catholic Observer

The youngsters (right) grilled the archbishop during a Q&A in which he attempted to answer some tough questions on faith, prayer and God.

The P7 pupils had been looking at prayer as a conversation with God during class discussion but found some of their questioning to be beyond the expertise of their teachers. They discussed who would be able to answer their questions and after ruling out the Pope, who would perhaps be too busy with the Year of Mercy celebrations, they emailed the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh who was happy to help.

The youngsters spent a morning at the Gillis Centre in the capital city speaking with the archbishop and baked cupcakes in their school colours as a gift.

Amongst the questions asked of the Archbishop was ‘has there ever been a time when you have lost faith in God?’ and ‘what does God look like and sound like to you?’

P7 pupil Logan asked how often the archbishop spends praying privately and whether he had ‘set prayers or conversations’ with God. Eve asked how you maintain focus during prayer while Callum asked if the Archbishop ever gets bored praying.

Answering the question of why we pray, the Archbishop told the pupils that they had been made by God to be happy, and that happiness goes hand in hand with holiness. “God means you to be happy and he means you to be holy and prayer becomes a way to understand how to do those things,” he said. “How to distance yourself from the wrong choice and how to make the right choices; how to think about that maturely and how to take your time about that.

“And prayer is good to help you do that—to distil and listen to what God has to say and to understand that God wants you to be happy. And being happy makes you holy and being holy makes you happy, because it has been the experience of lots and lots of human beings before us that unhappiness leads to un-holiness and un-holiness leads to tragedy and sin, death and mayhem. And we all know what that looks like.”

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—This story ran in full in the June 24 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.