Why is it so difficult to pray regularly?
Some reasons are obvious: over-busyness,
tiredness and too many demands on our time, constant distraction, laziness,
worship services that bore us, and methods of prayer that leave us flat and
inattentive.
But there is another reason too, suggested by
monks and mystics. The problem we have in sustaining prayer, they say, is often
grounded in the false notion that prayer needs to be interesting, exciting,
intense, and full of energy all the time. But that is impossible, nothing is
meant to be exciting all the time, including prayer and church services, and
nobody has the energy to always be alert, attentive, intense, and actively
engaged all the time.
When I am on the altar leading the community in
prayer, it’s not show time but rather, a moment to put everyone in the presence
of a loving Lord.
Prayer is meant to respect the natural rhythms of
our energy. Praying is like eating and, as we know from experience, you don't
always want a banquet. If you tried to have a banquet every day, you would soon
find coming to the table burdensome and would look for every excuse to escape,
to sneak off for a quick sandwich by yourself.
Eating has a natural rhythm: banquets and quick
snacks, rich meals and simple sandwiches, high times with fine linen and low
times with paper napkins, meals which take a whole evening and meals which you
eat on the run. And the two depend upon each other: You can only have high
season if you mostly have ordinary time. Healthy eating habits respect our
natural rhythms: our time, energy, tiredness, the season, the hour, our
boredom, our taste.
Prayer should be the same, but this isn't
generally respected. Too often we are left with this impression: All prayer
should be high celebration, upbeat, with high energy. The more variety the
better. Longer is better than shorter. Time and tiredness should never be a
consideration. During prayer, nobody should ever look at a wristwatch. People
at a prayer service need not be told how long the service will last. The
solution to boredom and lack of energy is more variety and imagination.
No wonder we often lack the energy to pray, and
want to avoid church services.
Monks have secrets worth knowing. They know that,
if you pray regularly, boredom and lack of energy will soon begin to wear you
down. The answer then is not so much new prayer forms and more variety, but
rhythm, routine, and established ritual. For monks, the key to sustaining a
daily life of prayer is not so much variety, novelty, and the call for higher
energy, but rather a reliance on the expected, the familiar, the repetitious,
the ritual, the clearly defined. What's needed is a uncomplicated, practical
prayer form which gives you a clear expectancy and does not demand of you an
energy that you cannot muster on a given day.
It is no accident, I suspect, that more people
used to attend daily church services when these were shorter, simpler, less
demanding in terms of energy expenditure, and gave people attending a clear
expectation as to how long they would last. The same holds true for other
prayers, the office of the church and basically all common prayer. What clear,
simple, and brief rituals provide is precisely prayer that depends upon something
beyond our own energy.
Some people complain about the rituals of the
church. What they don’t under stand is that the rituals can carry us, our
tiredness, our lack of energy, our inattentiveness, our indifference, and even
our occasional distaste. They keep us praying even when we are too tired to
muster up our own energy.
Sometimes, I think, we are working too hard to
make the Mass more entertaining and are not letting the rituals themselves work
hard enough
That's true too for prayer. We think that good
intention and energy will sustain our rituals of prayer, but they can't. Rather
our rituals of prayer can sustain our good will and our energy.
God prays for us as we reflect: “Blessed be God, because
he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me.” (Psalm
66:20).
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who grow tired
and busy and unable to pray. Help them relax and sense your presence in a heart
open to receive your gentle comfort and peace.
