Tag: Obstacles in PrayerJesus walks away… What would you do? What will you do?
I wonder what any action-oriented person would advise Jesus to do at that moment? I wonder what Martha would say? I do know what Mary would say. In a situation that mirrors this one in principle, Mary chose prayer over the seemingly obvious and appropriate choice of getting stuff done. Mary understood that spending time with God was even more important than attending to the temporal needs of others. Jesus is the supreme example of what it means to hold to what is most important and to live it, in spite of what would seem to the world and the worldly to be less so. I don’t know about you, but every day of my life I have far more to do than I can get done in every category (family, home, work, church etc). If it is true with every one of us that every day we have more work than we can ever accomplish, will taking time for prayer really hinder our productivity? Is it really a time problem that we have or a priority problem? What “stuff” is more important than knowing and loving God? What task list is more important than spending time with Him? Even when we have opportunities like Jesus had to impact people on a spiritual level – should we take them all? Of all the activities he should have chosen as a priority, shouldn’t this one have been on the top of His list? It wasn’t – at least it wasn’t number one. Instead of taking this important opportunity to attend even to the obvious spiritual needs of others, He gave us a profound example of what it means to choose the “better part.” Can we do any less? Seek Him – Find Him – Follow Him Dan I want to pray but struggle with my schedule – What do I do?
A: The desire to improve your prayer life is a sign of God’s presence and action in your soul. Be grateful for it and rest assured that God, “who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion…” (Phil 1:6). In other words, as you make the effort, God will guide you (he already is). Trust in that. Then consider four other points: 1. Beware of Perfectionism: Sometimes our desire for perfection is the enemy of progress. For instance, in the spiritual enthusiasm following a good retreat, we can often make unrealistic resolutions, e.g. “I am going to spend a full hour every day in meditative prayer,” or “I am going to pray the entire Liturgy of the Hours before I go to work.” Over-achievers especially struggle with this tendency. Instead of being satisfied with a moderate work out three times a week they feel they are not living up to their potential unless they cram in six hour-long workouts every week – as if they were still training for elite track meets instead of raising a family and running a business. With that attitude, they never get regular exercise at all; their unrealistic ideal of perfection keeps them from the basic maintenance work out that they really need. So, ask yourself: am I being unrealistic in my expectations for what constitutes a healthy amount of time for prayer, considering my life-situation? 2. Consistency, Consistency, Consistency: Work on quality and regularity rather than quantity. It is probably realistic to take ten minutes a day to speak heart-to-heart with Christ. Choose the same ten-minute slot each day, as best you can. Then add in another daily prayer commitment – maybe a decade of the Rosary on the drive home, or a 2-minute stop at the statue of Mary in the Parish parking lot before you pull into your driveway, or five minutes thanking God for the blessings of the day before you go to sleep (this is a beautiful prayer to pray together with your spouse). Along with your daily prayer commitment, have another one each week – a holy hour (or a holy half-hour), a family Rosary on Saturday evening, arriving 15 minutes early for Sunday Mass, one extra Mass each week (maybe during your lunch hour on Thursday)… Then add something extra for each liturgical season: a family visit to a nearby Marian shrine in the Easter Season, a morning of reflection during Advent, a retreat during Lent… Once you have identified reasonable commitments, do your best to stick to them. Keep track of you how do, and at the end of each month, adjust them – adding or subtracting commitments, increasing or decreasing time, as necessary. Remember, these are commitments you are making to Christ, and he knows your schedule, so if you’re simply making a decent effort to stay united to him, you will be growing and he will be pleased. It’s an ongoing thing. 3. Find Good Resources: One of the biggest obstacles to growth in prayer is not knowing what to do once we actually get to our prayer time. Busy people need a good resource to help focus their attention on Christ. The Better Part: A Christ-Centered Resource for Personal Prayer was designed to be exactly that, a resource to help busy, active people go deeper in their prayer life. The Magnificat booklet also has material that can be very helpful. My own Order produces daily meditation guides distributed by email. Keep looking for material that helps you connect quickly and deeply with Christ, and that fits into your scheduled prayer commitments. Ask around, try different things… Prayer is like walking: we all follow the same basic principles when we do it, but we each do so in a very personalized way. 4. Work as Worship: Turn your work into prayer. Remember that the goal of our prayer is to know, love, and follow Christ better and better. There is not meant to be a Maginot Line separating our prayer and our life activities. As the Catechism says, “we pray as we live, because we live as we pray” (#2752). Pursue excellence at work as a way of glorifying God and helping your neighbors; treat your peers and employees as Christ would treat them; make all that you do an offering to God; live virtue in the midst of temptations as a way of “glorifying God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:20)… Striving to make all your work, hobbies, family responsibilities, and relationships into the “aroma of Christ for God” (2 Corinthians 2:15) is in itself a prayer pleasing to God. It helps live more and more in Christ’s presence, bringing prayer and life closer together (though it never eliminates the need to dedicate time exclusively to God in prayer). Much more could be said, but the key thing is just to keep trying to improve. Don’t think you’ll find the perfect formula – there is no such thing. It’s a question of constancy and perseverance in our efforts, all the while trusting that God is always guiding us. Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC Dryness in Prayer – Part III – God’s Part in the Struggle
Lack of consolation in prayer (also known as dryness) may be a result of un-confessed and un-repented sin, or it may come from sloppiness or laziness in our effort to pray. But if we are making a reasonable effort to do our part, and yet we still don’t experience (or stop experiencing) consolation, it’s probably God’s fault, not ours. God is not a vending machine; he doesn’t have to reveal himself to us in a tangible way every time we try to press his buttons. This is one of the big differences between Christianity and many other religions. In pagan religions, for example, the gods were obliged to respond to worshippers in a certain way, if the worshipper performed a specific ritual, likewise in Satan worship. But Christ isn’t like that. We can’t control him. He can hold us back from feeling his presence in our souls, even when we are sincerely and conscientiously doing our part. Why? Why would he allow us to experience dryness in prayer? Because he wants our love for him to mature. At times, we can become subtly attached to our experience of God in prayer – to the consolations that we feel as we gaze upon his beauty or taste his goodness. Subconsciously, we can begin to seek those consolations even more than their source. We begin to value the gifts of God more than the God who gives them, like the little child who enjoys Uncle Ernie’s company because Uncle Ernie always gives out candy. Candy is a good sign of Uncle Ernie’s goodness and love for a child, but getting to know Uncle Ernie better and developing a more mature relationship with him means learning to go beyond the gum-drops. When God withholds consolations, he is purifying us of this subtle attachment to our feelings, so that our faith can grow and mature. To become mature Christians, we must learn more and more to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). In this context of spiritual growth, dryness in prayer is an opportunity to truly adore God himself, regardless of personal preferences and satisfactions. The mature love is the love that “lays down its life for the beloved” (John 15:13), not the love that “has no root deep down and does not last, should some trial come…” (Mark 4:17). Dryness is an invitation to give ourselves to God, putting aside our desire to get things from him. Doing Our Part Amid Dryness When God sends us this kind of purification, our reaction should be like a patient on an operating table. We must not try to avoid the often painful dryness, nor panic in the midst of it. Rather, we should persevere in our good efforts, trusting that the wise doctor of our souls is hard at work in ways that we cannot see or feel, healing us of spiritual cancers that we may not even know we have. (St. Ignatius of Loyola used to advise keeping to the exact minute of the time reserved to meditation whether we experience immense consolation or immense desolation.) This is what spiritual writers call “passive purification.” Active purification is when we consciously deny our natural inclinations in order to follow Christ more closely (see our blog posts on mortification). Passive purification is when God puts us into the fire in order to burn away impurities that are beyond our reach. The result is marvelous: purified silver is more fully itself after being put through the fire; we become more fully what God made us to be after he purifies us. But the process is often painful. When this dryness occurs for long periods of time on the level of emotions or imagination, it is sometimes referred as the “dark night of the senses.” The “dark night” is an image that St. John of the Cross used to sum up the whole phenomenon of dryness and passive purification. When this dryness occurs for long periods of time on the level of intellect and will (see part I of these posts on dryness in prayer for an explanation of these different faculties), it is sometimes referred to as the “dark night of the soul,” since these two faculties are the superior, spiritual faculties of the human soul. St. John of the Cross went into great detail about the signs by which authentic dark nights can be distinguished from dryness that comes from other sources. In summary, they are as follows: 1) we find no consolation in the things of God, but neither do we find any in the things of the world; 2) we find ourselves still attending very carefully to our prayer commitments, and our anxiety comes because we fear we are not serving him well; 3) we find ourselves unable (at least for unusually long periods of time) to make reflections and considerations when we go to mental prayer, as if our minds were somehow paralyzed. In these three areas, however, it is difficult for us to diagnose ourselves; it’s like trying to look at our backs in a mirror. Two Tangents Two more observations are needed before leaving this topic. First, those who are taking their spiritual lives seriously and striving to grow in prayer can sometimes be distracted by trying to figure out exactly where they are in the various stages of spiritual growth. It’s as if they think that having the perfect label will make their efforts more fruitful and helpful. This can be a pitfall. Because we are all individuals, and God leads us through unique paths of spiritual growth, it is not always easy to fit our real experience perfectly into the abstract categories that theology has to use to reflect systematically on these issues. We can become obsessed with finding the right label, instead of staying focused on loving God through prayer and action in obedience to his will. It is helpful to understand more and more the principles in the spiritual life, because then we can understand ourselves better as we begin to identify how those principles are at work in our experience. Yet, spiritual naval-gazing is unhelpful. This is one reason why spiritual direction is such a useful tool. It helps keeps us objective and balanced in our efforts to discern how God is acting in our lives. Second, those Christians who are living out their vocation to holiness as lay men and women often receive their purification in ways other than the “dark nights” of the senses and the soul. The suffering and the struggles for fidelity to Christ that come with the vocation to marriage can be acute. The suffering and struggles that come in one’s effort to build Christ’s Kingdom through work, community, and professional activities can also be acute. God can use those struggles and that suffering to perform his purification-operations. He is not limited to using dryness in prayer. This is one more reason why we should be wary of spiritual naval-gazing. The key to spiritual growth is accepting, embracing, and fulfilling God’s will moment by moment, not anticipating how God will work in us and then forcing him to follow our expectations. We must let the Doctor do his work, without demanding that he first teach us the whole science of medicine. Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC Dryness in Prayer – Part II – Our Part in the Struggle
Dryness in prayer is the contrary of consolation (the sense of satisfaction that God gives our emotions, imagination, intellect and will when we encounter his truth, goodness, and beauty). Dryness is the absence or lessening of those consolations, either every once in awhile, or for long periods of time. And the Catechism identifies dryness as one of the key obstacles in prayer. But we won’t be able to understand how to deal with the obstacle unless we understand, at least a little bit, what causes it. Dryness in prayer surfaces for one of two reasons: because of us, or because of God. Let’s start with the first reason. When the Going Gets Tough When we aren’t making a reasonable effort to do our part in the quest of prayer, dryness happens because of us. At times in the spiritual life, especially (but not only) at the beginning, God sends frequent and intense consolation to our souls. It is like a courtship, and he is courting us. He sends us flowers, gives us candy, takes us out on beautiful dates (in the spiritual sense). He is trying to convince us of his goodness, wisdom, and power. He is trying to win us over. As our relationship deepens, we realize that following God involves not just getting good gifts from him, but giving him the gift of ourselves. This we do through obeying his commandments and his will, through following his example, growing in virtue, building up the Church, loving our neighbor… All these things, since they are based on our desire to grow in our friendship with the One who is calling us, takes an effort on our part. We have to freely choose to respond to God’s action in our lives; it’s not automatic (if it were automatic, it wouldn’t be a relationship of love, or friendship). As this journey continues, we sometimes grow weary. We begin to hanker after the “onions of Egypt,” as the Israelites did during their sojourn in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. We long for an easier life, for the pleasures of self-indulgence, for the seductive comforts and passing gratifications that thirty pieces of silver can purchase for us. Moments like these are crucial for spiritual growth. They give us a chance to mature our love for God, to grow up a little bit more. But the tug of our fallen nature, egged on by the glitter of popular culture and the twittering of the devil on our interior homepage, is strong. Getting Sloppy One reaction that we can have in these times is to begin simply going through the motions in our prayer life. On the surface, we are continuing with the same prayer commitments that we have always kept, commitments that have the blessing of our spiritual director. And yet, we start fulfilling them in a routine way, not making a concerted effort to concentrate on our vocal prayers, for instance, or not carefully following the method of our mental prayer. We get careless. We don’t prepare the material for our meditation ahead of time. We don’t guard our interior silence during the day. We cut off a couple of minutes now and then from our meditation, or toy with involuntary distractions instead of putting forth the necessary effort to deflect them… Sometimes this diminishing effort is extremely subtle, even subconscious. Sometimes it is glaringly obvious: we are avoiding looking into God’s eyes because of an un-repented and un-confessed sin (dishonesty, infidelity, impurity, disordered ambition, willful consent to self-righteous anger or envy…). Whether subtle or flagrant, slacking off in our reasonable efforts to pay attention to God when we pray will often inhibit us from hearing his voice. Not always, because God can make himself heard even when we’re not listening, but almost always. Sidestepping Along When our inbox is overly cluttered, we lose motivation to roll up our sleeves and get to work, so we procrastinate or look for busy-work to distract ourselves. This inhibits us from experiencing the satisfaction that comes from a job well done, from meeting goals and following objective priorities. Likewise in the spiritual life. When we hit a steep section of the road as we’re following Christ, we can stray off to the side, take a rest, or even go looking for a shortcut, though we know very well that our Lord is standing on the upgrade beckoning us forward. Until we get back on track, we won’t be able to experience the consolation God has for us, because we won’t be meeting God (the source of consolation) where he is waiting to meet us. Think of a gymnast who reaches a plateau in her training. Her coach knows that she needs to maintain the same effort that she was putting out while she was making visible, rapid progress. But she starts getting discouraged, precisely because her progress isn’t so rapid and visible at the moment. If she trusts her coach and perseveres, soon she will be beyond the plateau, achieving higher levels of excellence and experiencing the satisfaction that goes with it. The coach can encourage her, but in the end she has to decide if she will keep putting forth the effort, doing her part. The First Question So this is the first question we need to ask ourselves if we are experiencing dryness in prayer: Am I still doing my part? Or has some un-confessed sin or subtle self-pity – or just plain laziness (be humble) – drained my efforts? To find an objective answer to that question, it is often helpful to go over our prayer commitments with our spiritual director, to describe how we are praying the Rosary, the Mass, the meditation, the morning offering… It can also be useful to go over the basic guidelines of prayer again, e.g. reading The Fundamentals of Christian Meditation from the first section of The Better Part. (For your convenience, I have included a checklist below that can help remind you of what doing your part in the daily meditation entails.) If you discover that, indeed, you have been slacking off a bit. Don’t be afraid! Bring it up in confession, and then make some small adjustments to your commitments that will help motivate you to get back in the swing. For example, change the book you are using to help you meditate, or the place of your morning prayer, or the time of day, or buy yourself a new Rosary… A fresh start can be sparked without these kinds of external tricks, but they can sometimes help. If, on the other hand, after a calm and objective self-evaluation, you are convinced that you are still making a reasonable effort to do your part, then the dryness you are experiencing probably isn’t because of you, it’s probably because of God. Next time, we will talk about why God sometimes withholds his consolations. (By the way, I keep saying “reasonable effort” because that’s all God asks of us. Some people tend to think that if their effort isn’t perfect in every way, it isn’t reasonable. That’s not true. God knows we are not angels.) …[from "The Better Part: A Christ-Centered Resource for Personal Prayer"]… On any given day, then, measuring whether your meditation went well or badly is not so easy. Your meditation may have been quite pleasing to God and full of grace for your soul even when it was unpleasant and difficult from a strictly emotional perspective. An athlete may have a great practice session even though it was painful and frustrating – likewise with a daily meditation. The best we can do is to give some indicators below. The most important thing, though, is simply to keep striving to pray better. Speak about your prayer life in spiritual direction and confession, and trust that if you are sincerely doing all your best, the Holy Spirit will do the rest. My meditation went badly when I…
My meditation went well when I…
Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC |
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My reading in the gospel this morning made me laugh (Luke 5:12-16). Here’s the breakdown. Jesus heals – Jesus tells the healed to not tell anyone – the word gets out anyway – a crowd gathers – Jesus 
Q: Dear Father John, I am a busy executive and struggle to make time for prayer. What should I do? I do want to improve my prayer life but I just struggle with time.
Q: Dear Father John, I have been praying (mental prayer) for a long time. But lately I seem to be experiencing dryness in my prayer – I just don’t seem to get as much out of it as I used to. Is this the “dark night of the soul”? If not, what’s going on, and what should I do?
