Being real in prayer

“Father, I simply cannot pray when everyone around me is so noisy, so distracting and so annoying!  Why can’t they respect that I am trying to pray?” 

Does this sentiment sound or look familiar to you?  I have heard this lament on many occasions when talking to my former parishioners (I don’t have any real ‘parishioners’ now during my medical hiatus from formal ministry).  What I suspect is happening often is that for many Catholics, there seems to be a very rigid notion of what prayer is.  For many, perhaps the “problem” lies in the notion that we can only pray to God when we feel that we are holy, when we are in a reverential mood, when everything in our life is ‘in place’, and when there are no distractions in life that steer our attention away from our ‘pure’ focus on God.  While it would be ideal that we are reverential, holy, not distracted and pure, the truth is that most of the time, we are not.  There seems to be so many ways that we are not as we should be when we place ourselves before God in prayer.  And when we find ourselves this way, it may cause many to give up on regular prayer altogether, simply because we are not ‘worthy’ when we place ourselves before God.

I wonder if this sentiment comes from the ways in which many of us communicate with our elders and those in any position of authority.  Could it be that we have been told ad nauseam that we are not to waste their precious time, and that if we were to speak with them, it had better be about something that is important, and that there is a need to observe some form of protocol?  If this were what we have been brought up on, it would be almost a ‘natural’ progression to transfer this mentality to the ways in which we communicate with God, which is what prayer essentially is. 

What are the dangers if this is our attitude towards God and prayer?  Here are a few:

• We will not meet God unless there is a problem in life that needs God’s divine attention or help.
• We will never see God as someone whom we really can have a relationship with, let alone someone who is truly interested in us.
•  Communication or encounters with God will be met with a deep sense of dread and a sense of excitement comparable to a visit to the dentist.
• It will be very hard to truly believe that God loves us unconditionally simply because there is a proper way to encounter God.

Of course, in our Catholic ritual of prayer and liturgical worship, there are very organized ways in which we bring ourselves as a community to meet God in his mercy and love.  The challenge facing every Catholic is to know that these moments of ‘organised encounter’ are very real and very good ways to meet God and to reach out to him who is present in each person at worship and prayer.  But these are not to be the only moments to do so, and certainly not the only ways to do so.  These can pave the way towards deeper and more intimate encounters with God when we decide to meet him in the realities of our hectic, frenetic, disorganized and messy lives that we all live. 

In fact, when we do pray to him not despite but because our lives are such, it makes our prayer so much more real and genuine.  Prayer no longer just becomes a ritual or a rite, but is something in which we bring our entire true selves before God who really is interested in what bugs us, what irritates us, what bores us, what excites and motivates us, and what disappoints and makes us livid and grumpy as well.  When we carry these very real feelings and sentiments with us before God, we are no longer trying to be what we think we ought to be, but begin to truly lift our hearts and minds to God who is always interested in what is going on in our hearts and minds.  And we also need to know that God, being God, may not need us to tell him all about what fills our lives, but will lovingly accept these as what are offered to him in an offering of prayer and love. 

Do I feel like praying every time I go into prayer?  To be dreadfully honest, no.  There are moments and sometimes, periods of days (even weeks) when I don’t feel like praying.  It may not come as a surprise to any of you that chemotherapy and its sometimes vile and nauseous effects can make one really want to put praying on the back burner.  But if I only depend on my feelings before praying, I would be over-dependent on my feelings alone to love God. 

Love, when dependent on feelings alone, is at worst, idolatrous, because it can become self-serving.  Imagine a married couple that only loves each other when they feel like it!  They wouldn’t remain married for long, and will most probably abandon the marriage once their ‘feelings’ wear off and become threadbare.  But, as the Marriage Encounter movement has always emphasized, when love becomes a decision, and not something that purely decided upon feelings, it becomes far more precious and valuable and genuine. 

So, if you are like my parishioners who have complained about how you are distracted by noise, and are annoyed, it could be that there is a right there a very good opportunity for real prayer which you may just be missing. 

A mystic once said that telling God our plans is a sure way of making God laugh.  Is our prayer something that only sees us making God roll with laughter?  Perhaps we should begin to make our prayer as real as possible.