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Bearings:
Most of us can remember setting out to learn a new skill like playing a musical instrument, painting or a sport, only to soon give up because our first ungainly results humiliated and disappointed us. The muddy painting, the awful sounds, the clumsy movements are so different from the graceful creations of the experts we admire. In no time at all we have made excuses to drop the project. We tell ourselves it just doesn’t suit us and we didn’t have the time for the new hobby after all. Why do we give up praying - the kind of praying that takes time and going into one’s room and shutting the door like Jesus said? Well, our first experiences of ‘praying in secret’ are seldom what we want. We assume others praying in secret must be good at it, really focused in their conversation with God or serene in their meditation. In contrast, our experience is anything but focused and serene. What could be more discouraging than the whirl of distractions we experience when we try to speak to God and even more when we try to listen to God? Adept at lying to ourselves, it doesn’t take long for us to come up with excuses for giving up the attempts to pray. Our temperaments are clearly not suited to this inner stuff, we think - as we are doers or extroverts. And it’s a waste of precious time just to flounder around with all these wandering thoughts. We stuff down the shame of discovering that we are no good at prayer. If we are lucky, a wise friend might see through our excuses and encourage us to start over. But her advice won’t be the same she would use to urge us to take up our sport or craft again. You can’t say about praying: “Practice makes perfect; gradually you will get to be really good, so be patient with the messiness of your beginner’s results. In time you will be proud of what you achieve.” Instead, the advice might go something like this: “Honey, prayer is God’s way of getting you to meet the cast of characters you call your distractions. God knows we spend a lot of time disowning them and pretending we don’t know them. They are family. Prayer will always be messy, because they are. “Those ‘distractions’ are our mess. They’re the mess we are in. So prayer is our rendezvous with them and God is present to introduce us. Maybe what you call your distractions are really the main event. Often God prefers to stay quietly in the background at first when we pray because the real business in hand is setting us free, and only truth sets us free. “We are really bad at telling the truth. And we will never get better at telling the truth until we meet our preoccupations and obsessions, the stuff we are always telling ourselves deep down only we don’t realize it until we stop our activity. When we stop to pray, then these preoccupations swim to the surface and start splashing and jostling us. Meet the gang! “Instead of pushing them back down, arguing with them, cursing them, or trying to turn our backs on them, why don’t you look them in the face and treat them as parts of yourself clamoring for attention? The feelings they are revealing could be God’s real agenda of prayer. The desires, resentments, memories and messages that keep on insinuating themselves into your prayer might be the real signposts telling you what to pray about. “I bet your distractions are the ‘usual cast of characters.’ We try to pray, but we start obsessing about out ‘to do’ list. Well, what a great opportunity to pray about the big lie you were probably told as a child about not being lazy, about being valuable only when you were meeting other people’s needs, about the need to prove that you could stay on top of every situation. Your preoccupation is telling you about your bondage. So ask God about what it would be like to be free from this burden, free to take time out with a clear conscience. Ever drifted into a sexual fantasy in prayer? Did it embarrass you? A great opportunity to break a conventional taboo! Why not bring up ‘the big subject’ with God and talk about what you are feeling about yourself as a sexual being just now, and ask God to give your sexuality a blessing today?” We don’t always have friends who can be as frank as this, but none of us has a better friend than the Holy Spirit to teach us about these encounters. Make a list of what seems to get in the way of your prayer, and ask the Spirit how they might actually become a way into prayer. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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