My tractor, mower and gator are getting a “tune-up” for Spring. This reflection is a “tune-up” session to get your spiritual vehicle body and soul back humming again. Let me share why it is difficult for us to spend some time in quiet prayer:
What are these forces that distract us? They’re simply the daily headaches and heartaches that afflict us.
First, the headaches: Thomas Merton was once asked what he considered to be the major spiritual disease in the Western world. His answer:
Efficiency. The major spiritual disease in the Western world is efficiency because from the government offices down to the nursery we have to keep the plant running and, afterwards, we’ve no energy left for anything else.
He’s right.
The first problem we have with prayer is that we’re too–busy and too–preoccupied to make time for it. There’s never, it seems, a good time for prayer. Always we’re too–busy, too–stressed, too–tired, or too–preoccupied to sit or kneel down to pray. We rise early, groan as our alarm-clocks startle us from sleep, rush through breakfast, ready things for the day, fight crowds and traffic enroute to work, settle into a task that’s demanding and draining, gulp-down a quick lunch, end the work-day tired, commute back home, ready another meal, tend to the needs of loved ones, share a meal with others who are just as tired and restless as we are, then, often enough, have still another meeting or event to attend in the evening.
The day simply takes us, consumes us, drains us, and leaves us, in its wake, sitting on the couch before a TV set, tired, dissipated, still needing to prepare some things for tomorrow, and wanting a mindless distraction rather than the discipline of prayer. It’s hard to pray in our over–busy lives.
But we’re not just too busy to pray, we’re also too restless. This restlessness is fanned to a high flame by the culture: five hundred TV channels are within our reach, the internet brings the whole world into our private rooms, there are new movies that we haven’t seen, new songs we haven’t heard, colorful magazines whose covers beckon, sporting events that seem to be on everyone’s mind, and every kind of special event from the Olympics, to the Academy awards, to World cups, to celebrity gossip programs, all distracting us. Beyond that, everyone around us seems to be travelling to interesting places, doing interesting things, meeting interesting people. We alone, it seems, are missing out on life, stuck, outside the circle, with nothing interesting to do.
It’s hard to pray when we are restless and, mostly, we are. Henri Nouwen puts this well: “I want to pray,” he says, “but I also don’t want to miss out on anything: television, movies, socializing with friends, drinking–in the world.”
Our deepest greed is not for money, but for experience. We don’t want to miss out on life. Thus, to pray is truly a discipline because when we sit or kneel in prayer so many of our natural cravings feel starved and begin to protest. Restlessness is a great impediment to prayer.
Finally, beyond the headaches and restlessness, there is the ambiguity of prayer itself. Simply put, prayer isn’t easy because we don’t understand it, don’t know how to do it, and don’t understand how the experience should feel. Talking to God, hearing God’s voice, and centering ourselves in God is not as easy as we sometimes make it out to be. God’s reality is not physical and tangible like the things of this world. The world seems more real; family and friends can be hugged, touched and talked to, (from a distance during Covid) and physical sensation of all kinds doesn’t leave us doubting its reality. But relating to God demands something else and it’s easy to find ourselves bored, doubting, distracted, and anxious to get on to something else when we try to pray.
What we experience in prayer is just as real as the physical world, but we need to be at a certain depth of prayer to know this—and that’s the paradox: because prayer can seem unreal we often stop doing it, but it will only seem real if we persevere in it long enough and do it deeply enough. We often give up too soon. Prayer isn’t easy.
So, once again let me suggest one way to pray:
Start your prayer with…
1. Gratitude: Begin by thanking God, just like talking to a trusted friend, for whatever you are most grateful for today.
2. Awareness: Revisit the times in the past twenty-four hours when you were and were not the best version of yourself. Talk to God about these situations and what you learned about them.
3. Significant Moments: Identify something you experienced today and explore what God might be trying to say to you through that event or person.
4. Peace: Ask God to forgive you for any wrong you have committed against yourself, another person, or Him and to fill you with a deep and abiding peace.
5. Freedom: Speak with God how He is inviting you to change your life, so that you can experience the freedom to be the best version of yourself.
6. Others: Lift up to God anyone you feel called to pray for today, asking God to bless and guide that person with comfort and peace.
7. Finish by praying the Our Father.
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that we learn to let go of feeling restless and bathe in Your love in prayer.
