A very common worry among people who try to pray regularly and live a devout life is that of being distracted at prayer.Tanquerey gives some wise advice. He says that
We must [...] strive seriously to repel promptly the distractions that present themselves to our mind;He also says:
We must, likewise reduce the number of such distractions by a vigorous fight against their causes: habitual dissipation of mind, the habit of day-dreaming, the preoccupations and attachments that absorb the mind and the heart."It is important to bear these things in mind first because such faults are easy to fall into and very common. Channel-hopping through useless things on television, or surfing idly and without purpose on the internet are examples of what he means by "dissipation." However, once we have seriously tried to take the steps that he recommends, he says,
[...] there is no cause for worry concerning such involuntary distractions as run through our minds or disturb our imagination. These are but trials, not faults, and once we have learned to profit by them, they but increase our merit and the value of our prayers.The principal means of "profiting" from such distractions is to understand them as a cross and to embrace the cross humbly in union with Our Lord, recognising our unworthiness to be speaking to him, and thanking him for purifying us in this way.
I think that also we can offer the time that we give in our prayers as a sacrifice. It is of the nature of the holocaust sacrifice of the scriptures. We take some time that is ours: we can spend it in various ways. Rather than waste it on something useless ("dissipation") we make it over to God without reserve. It becomes His time to do with as he pleases. We may then be sure that he will act in our soul in the way that He sees fit, to draw us closer to Him. This will be true even if our prayers do not seem to us to be very devout - sometimes even because we do not feel very pious. "Our Lord does not ask us to be successful, he asks us to be faithful."
4 comments:
This is excellent stuff... Thanks so much
www.dei-gloriam.blogspot.com
Dear Fr Tim,
Found this article on prayer very helpful, particularly when one is making a meditation.
Thankyou,
God bless,
Mrs Jackie Parkes MMJ
I love the quote 'Our Lord does not want us to successful, he asks us to be faithful'. Prayer can sometimes be so robotic that you wonder whether what you are doing is right. It is hard to concentrate on the spiritual whilst the secular world around us is doing everything to distract. But i believe that any prayer is better than no prayer.
Distractions in prayer are certainly frustrating. I think it helps not to measure the "success" of our time spent in prayer by our own human experience (i.e. I couldn't focus so it was a waste of time. . . I didn't even feel or hear God at all. . . etc. . .) but rather to recognize that when we come before God in prayer, there is a supernatural conversation going on that we may not even recognize ourselves. Time in prayer is never "wasted" regardless of how distracted, bored, tired, etc. . . we are.
One analogy that that has been brought to my attention before is that trying to deal with distractions in prayer is much like a salmon trying to swim up stream. It's a constant struggle and you can't give up otherwise you're not going to make it up the stream, but if you keep fighting the distractions you will eventually make your way up the stream.
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