Dear Friends
Today I want to meditate in your company on the subject of personal prayer.
A famous writer on prayer urged us to ‘pray as you can, not as you can’t’. If your prayer is already rich and rewarding, leading you daily closer to God, fine. Don’t mess with it! But so many of the sins that trouble people when they come to confession usually have their roots in something wrong with the person’s prayer life and, if that is the case with you, take time out to review how you pray. It is always possible for us to have outgrown an particular type of prayer, or for it to have become mindless and repetitious, or it may simply no longer challenge us. One of the most common mistakes is to assume that ‘real’ prayer means feeling pious or holy.
We are all called to union with God; the urge for this is part of what is meant by being created “in the image and likeness of God”. But it is the reality that is “being with God” that we must seek, not the sensation of being with God. To chase after such a sensation – however evidenced: by peace, by exultation, or whatever – is to chase a shadow at the expense of substance.
Anyone can pray when they are filled with the sensation of the presence of God; praying is easy under these circumstances. Prayer is difficult when we all feel is emptiness, when our mind is everlastingly wandering from one irrelevance to another, when we feel the whole exercise is pointless. That is exactly when prayer is most productive. We are being taught perseverance, but we are also being taught something deeper, something quite difficult to express.
First of all, we are learning to let go of the sensations of peace, exultation and the rest. If they genuinely come from God, be refreshed by them and be grateful for them – but don’t cling to them and don’t seek them out. They are God’s for the giving, not ours for the taking. We are learning to trust God. We know He is there and we know that He loves us – and we are learning to hold on to this belief even when we cannot feel His presence.
He has commanded us to pray and now perhaps we are doing it when it seems pointless; we are learning to follow where He leads even when, to human eyes, it seems wrong or foolish. This comes up, of course, with many of Christ’s commands to us – love your enemy, turn the other cheek, etc – but there is something extremely fundamental here. It is in this very process of pressing forward, against our better judgement, simply because it is God’s will, that we grow spiritually.
In part, this is because, by doing His will, we arrive at a new vantage point and from that point we get a different view of the world – possibilities and opportunities open up in front of us that we would not otherwise have even suspected were there. In other words, God does know what He is doing and has a purpose in leading each of us in the way He does.
But also the actual struggle in which we do not only obey God’s command, but make it part of us (for example, the struggle, not merely to abstain from vengeance towards an enemy, but also actually and spiritual growth. We cannot just pay lip service to the faith, but we have to engage with it.
The reality is that it takes time to learn these lessons. We commit ourselves to the Lord, we try to do His will, we fail, we are picked up by the Lord, and we start all over again. It is in the context of this continually repeating cycle that we discover the true role of feeling the presence of God, feeling peace and happiness, feeling exultant: they are gifts given by God, when we turn back to Him, to reassure us about our failure, to encourage us to try again and, I’m afraid, to fortify us for the trials to come.
Of course, sooner or later, we come to recognise the cycle as it operates in our own life, and this should make it easier for us to cling on during the periods of emptiness. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't! So often, as soon as we start to recognise the cycle and to feel comfortable with the process, the Lord gives it a twist into an aspect of one’s life that is even more challenging!
None of us, save only God, know where this leads; we are all of us still on the journey, the journey into mystery. Prayer when it seems pointless, prayer when we feel exhausted, prayer when we are in great suffering, prayer when we feel most alone: it is not for us to try to pierce the mystery of what is to come, but rather to enter into it by bending all our efforts to doing whatever it is He is calling us to do right now.
For all this, as times goes on, a deeper and different peace develops. It is not the peace of quietude, but rather the peace of equilibrium in this midst of chaos. It is the peace that comes from the knowledge of the strength of God that covers each one of us like a shield. It is the peace that comes from the certainty that, whatever may come, we do not face it alone but hand-in-hand with the One who is All-in-all. Do not be afraid: enter into His peace.
May God bless you all.
+Patrick O’Donoghue, Bishop of Lancaster