Why Is Prayer Such A Struggle?
How I pray is breathe.” -Thomas Merton
I grew up with the slogan, “Prayer changes things,” which I believed. I was just wrong about what got changed.
I thought it could change my lot, save my soul, rescue people I cared about. I hoped I could change God’s mind. Not surprisingly, that kind of prayer didn’t “work.” When it didn’t, we spoke of “unanswered prayer,” as if our pleas had ended up in heaven’s dead letter bin. “Answered prayers,” we were taught, came in one of three messages: Yes, No, and Maybe Later.
As I grew old enough to question the basic assumptions of that kind of prayer, I stopped praying. I knew how to pray in public (I became a pastor, after all), but I had no idea how to be by myself in the presence of God.
In my forties, when I found I was unable to locate my own soul, I was worried enough to seek help and I ended up sitting with Basil Pennington, a prayer master. Gradually I learned to sit in a few minutes of silence, just wordlessly saying yes to the divine presence. I started paying attention to my breath as literal inspiration. It felt like nothing, and yet I was drawn to it.
Thinking back to those days when I hoped my entreaties could possibly change God’s mind, it’s ironic and even a little comical that the mind that finally changed was mine. And I don’t just mean that I thought differently about things; I mean that my mind was altered.
In her new book, Practice the Pause, author and spiritual director Caroline Oakes uses evidence from groundbreaking neuroscience to demonstrate that even brief periods of this kind of quiet prayer actually re-wire the human brain. In as little as five thirty-minute sessions, brain scans of first-time meditators show a different circuitry. The parts of the brain that stimulate fight-or-flight stress shrink on the screen, while the parts that allow us to stay calm, present, and compassionate actually get larger.
While I didn’t know what was happening to my brain when I first learned to be still, I felt something change within. This was prayer I could believe in. This was a God I could trust, and to whom I could entrust those I loved.
Prayer changes things, yes. It can change your mind, literally, if you say yes.
Today’s Question:
Why is prayer such a struggle?
Question # 12 , “Are you the person you say you are?” comes Tuesday March 21.
David, I liked “wordlessly saying yes to the divine presence.” Instead of asking God to say yes to our requests, we say yes to his presence.
Reminded me of something I heard at seminary, a definition of intercessory prayer: “sitting in his presence with people on your heart.” That’s it. No requests. No direction to the divine. Just sitting in his presence with loved ones on your heart.
Lately, just two weeks ago, I started doing Two-Way Prayer. A friend who’s been doing it for years had been telling me about it. I finally tried it. You sit quietly and wait for the “prayer” to come. Then you sit quietly again and wait for the “answer.” If you want to, you can write them both down and share them with a friend. That’s what my friend does. And that’s what I’ve been doing too.
I am finding it–like all new things—both disarming and satisfying. The common element here is the “sit quietly” part.
Thanks again, David, for taking us along with you on this Lenten quest.
I love that two-way prayer. I think anything we do in quiet holds place for God in the moment. Some people don’t like to sit—-and walking works well for them. A few people I know pray best on long runs, when they get into the “zone.”
When I first got sober I had a ton of resentments – some justified some not so much. Someone that heard me speak at a meeting suggested the “Resentment Prayer.” I would say each person’s name and pray for their “health happiness serenity security and prosperity.” I’d do it in the shower on my knees and initially I had so many my shower would last like 30 minutes. But as the months wore on and I did it daily I found a lot of those resentments began to wash or fade away and the prayer got shorter and shorter.
I went through a very difficult 3 years in recovery (years 7-10) and one of the things that went by the wayside was prayer and meditation. I had been forsaken and it didn’t appear anyone was listening. I got through my incredible difficulties through exercise, meetings, getting a new sponsor, and re-connecting with people. Prayer and meditation have not found their way back into my “repertoire.” So for me it’s a very probing question why prayer is such a struggle and one I should probably meditate on!!
Many spiritual traditions have a form of that “Resentment Prayer,” where we pray blessings upon those we struggle to love or even to tolerate. It’s another example of what I was trying to name in this piece–that eventually what changes is not your enemies, but you.
As I noted in reply to Michael–no two people pray alike, and your best quiet prayer will probably not be anything like mine. The best prayer advice I ever got was–‘Pray the way you able, not the way you are unable.’ Sometimes we meet–or read about–someone with a powerful prayer experience, and we feel like we need to do that too, even though we’re radically different people. So–wherever you find some quiet moments–there God awaits.
While over the years I have recognized and acknowledged to myself that I was more than a little resistant to prayer, I have never, until now (first time to be asked the question), been prompted to explore the ‘why’ that is. I must say that the exploration into the ‘why’ of this condition has not been A to B. Instead, the trajectory of my exploration took on the form of a spiral in the shape of a funnel with me beginning in the small tip of the spiral then unwinding from there. The difficulty now is to convert all that thought into an arranged aggregation of words that another might make some sense out of. For me, that is always the difficulty in communicating the abstract.
When I was a little kid my mom taught me to pray at bedtime and give grace before meals. I never liked doing either. Then, when I would attend Sunday school, Bible school and sit through sermons at church, whenever praying would occur it made me uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that I usually wanted to immediately leave the scene, which I could never do. So the question is, “Why, as a little kid, did I have such an adverse reaction to praying? What in the world could have happened to me that would produce this kind of reaction?”
Well, after a lot of peeling one layer after another off the proverbial onion, I came upon an answer buried deep among the levels of consciousness that exist below my level of awareness that satisfied my questions.
I prefer not to go into detail about what I discovered but I will say this…in that time period that the books of the Old Testament cover, one prayed at their own risk for prayers in those times often led to painful consequences.
To add a bit of context, I grew up in the country. My dad was a professional ranch/farm mgr. and we frequently moved to different ranches in remote places in CO., NM., and AR. Wherever we lived my mom would seek out the nearest church and she made sure that every Sunday she, my brother, and myself were there. Interestingly my dad always seemed to have some pressing ranch work to do on Sundays. What those old country preachers liked to focus on were stories from the Old Testament and plenty of hell fire and brimstone. They also liked to yell a lot and beat their fists on the pulpit. That sure wasn’t what I liked.
Fortunately, even though over the years I have had an aversion to prayer, that did not stop me from communicating with the invisible, nonconceptual intelligence aka Creator of ALL. I’ve done and continue to do that plenty. I have taught myself how to shut down my “I know it all mind” aka “chattering mind” and enter a space that is quiet and still where the Creator is never not available to converse. I call this place in my mind the foyer. The foyer is the space that is not a space located between after and next.
I now see prayer as a stepping aside; a letting go; a quiet time of listening and loving. I do not confuse it with supplication of any kind, because it is a way of remembering my holiness. Why should holiness entreat, isn’t it fully entitled to everything love has to offer? And what I have found is that it is to Love I go in prayer. Prayer is my offering; a giving up of myself to be at one with Love. There is nothing to ask because there is nothing left to want. And if there is something to ask it’s not to ask for what seems to be lacking it is to ask to recognize and receive what is already there.
Like I said before David, your questions open doors. Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to explore, teach and learn.