Seasons of Our Prayer
For the Spirit of Prayer.
ALMIGHTY God, who pourest out on all who desire it, the spirit of grace and of supplication; Deliver us, when we draw nigh to thee, from coldness of heart and wanderings of mind, that with stedfast thoughts and kindled affections, we may worship thee in spirit and in truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Getting back into a rhythm is a difficult thing. When I wrote frequently for our blog last year, the process of sitting down to put thoughts to paper was routine, familiar, and often easy. I developed a liturgy that suited me well and allowed writing to be a prayerful exercise. Yet, after a five month hiatus for the birth of my daughter, I find myself struggling to make my fingers type. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, but rather that the time away has dulled the familiarity of the liturgy. What was once a discipline of stillness to center my thoughts and prayers well enough to write has become once more a laborious struggle to remember how to be still. It’s much easier to let other things take away my time, and I find myself making excuses that other things are more important than this more cumbersome task at hand. It feels like I’m starting over.
The spiritual life and our life of prayer can often take a similar shape. Time away can soften the discipline, and entering back into the rhythm can feel overwhelming, pointless, and more of a struggle than the first time we tried. It can be discouraging even when we miss a day of our rhythm. We can feel the need to “make-up” for what we missed yesterday: we pray for longer times, read multiple Daily Office lessons, or try to add in a prayer practice that we don’t normally do. And when we fail to do enough to satisfy our anxiety regarding the question of if God still loves us, we will become discouraged and spend even more time out of our prayer. Thus, a devastating cycle begins, and we’re left discouraged, anxious, and feeling something worse than spiritual dryness–spiritual unworthiness.
Bishop Scarlett emphasizes in his teaching the necessity for a developed Rule of Life that will manageably support a healthy Life of Prayer. This Rule of Life is one by which we set prayer practices and rhythms that shape our relationship with the Lord. Ideally, this Rule of Life offers regular spaces for silence, contemplation, and multiple forms of prayer. As detailed by Martin Thornton, our lives should be characterized by a threefold rule: Eucharist, the Daily Offices, and personal prayer. We are called to regularly meet our Lord by our participation in the liturgy of Mass and reception of the Eucharist; we should faithfully be praying the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer; and we are called to times of personal prayer, whether this is set aside at designated hours, or extemporaneously throughout the day. These three should serve as the foundations of our life of prayer, by which we are able to add additional practices at our–and ideally our Spiritual Director’s–discretion, such as adoration, the rosary, Compline, the Angelus, and many others. Yet, our Rule should not be one that burdens us. Thornton writes in his text Pastoral Theology, that, “The health of the Soul depends upon the health of its Prayer, which in turn depends upon the adequacy of its conception of God” (192). What we know of God will inform our life of prayer, and our life of prayer will be indicative of the state of our soul. This is why any Spiritual Director or pastoral staff member you see at St. Matthew’s will inevitably ask you, “How’s your life of prayer?” We aren’t just making polite conversation: one’s life of prayer is a window into the state of one’s soul, and whether we realize it or not, our prayer reflects our understanding of God.
It is easy in our zeal of recent conversion, or in our desperate attempts to rectify the spiritual dryness of a season, to create a Rule of Life that is overburdensome and sets us up for failure. As mentioned before, when we allow ourselves to enter into this cycle of failure within our prayer life, we begin to experience a sense of spiritual unworthiness. We think to ourselves that God couldn’t possibly want anything to do with us because we’ve been so flaky. We begin to think that we aren’t worthy of His time anymore. And whether or not we want to admit it to ourselves, we start to think that He must love us less because of the things we’ve put before Him.
The truth of the matter is that we aren’t worthy of Him: no one except Christ holds that title. Yet, just as by Adam we came to know sin, so too by Christ do we come to know forgiveness, mercy, and the love of God the Father despite our unworthiness. Just as the Celebrant says in the Prayers of Consecration each week in the Mass, “And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice; yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service; not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord…”
So we once more return to our life of prayer and Rule. Just as the Church Calendar experiences liturgical seasons, so too do our lives experience seasons of our prayers. Since the birth of my daughter, my ability to do daily centering prayer, or extended times of contemplation has gone out the window. Yet, this is ok, and there is a sweetness–even amidst its chaos–of the life of prayer which I now lead: praying the Daily Offices while simultaneously feeding or playing with her; quick prayers of thanks throughout the day for the gifts of things that stand out much more starkly since becoming a parent; prayers to our Blessed Mother for discernment and teaching on how to be a good mother; and times of silent prayer as she settles down for bed. It’s been easy to get discouraged that my prayer life looks drastically different than before, and yet, when I reflect on it, it is still composed of the same threefold components of Eucharist, Daily Offices, and personal prayer. It would be useless for me to burden myself with prayer practices that don’t match my season of life, and only cause the potential for a cycle that leads me away from prayer, not towards it.
Let us remember that the seasons of our life will change, and it is natural that our prayer life will follow suit. May we be drawn away from coldness of heart, from the lies that we are unworthy of God’s time, and into the presence of the Lord where we may begin to experience the fullness of joy, even in our changing seasons of life.
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It can be difficult to determine our own Rule and prayer practices in isolation. If you are interested in discussing any of these, please click the link below to contact our Pastoral Staff. Any one of them would be delighted to meet with you.