The basic reason for difficulties in prayer is that God always wants more. There is no limit to his love for us.God is always calling us to surrender, to accept this love. There is a price we have to pay for this encounter. It is the death of our selfishness; our ego has to diminish its role of supremacy. This is the basis for our difficulties in prayer.
In the first place this battle takes place in the perennial conflict of finding time for prayer. If we have a child in critical condition in the hospital or on a more mundane level if our favorite team is playing in the finals of the World Cup or the Superbowl time is not an issue. We find time for what is important to us.
Teresa of Avila tells us prayer is a conversation with someone we know loves us. Our difficulty is overcoming our self-love to let our love of God rise to the top of our agenda. To do this we face the challenge of change, often deep personal change. Teresa says that prayer and comfortable living are not compatible. Prayer demands sacrifice that claims our time and then our lifestyle. This is the basis of our difficulties in prayer.
When we are praying distractions are the number one abstruction. The immediate answer is to regain our focus. This is done basically by returning to the text or our prayer word, the mantra. This is all part of the battle of prayer. The ego demands control. The Spirit is calling us to let go, in confidence, acceptance and surrender to God.
The root of distractions is this conflict of the ego and the Spirit. The distractions will not go away completely until God takes over within us in the development of deep contemplative prayer. In the meanwhile we need to understand there is gold to be found in the struggle of our relentless flights of fancy.
On the conscious level our struggle is between our ego’s unending quest for control to the gradual submission to God. At a deeper level God often uses distractions to surface issues and concerns that help us on the road to self-knowledge and humility. Frequently what seems like a total waste of time is, in fact, a beautiful invitation to embrace humility.
This passage to the center means moving beyond our superficial self, the self dominated by the false values of a consumer society. This is the self that creates a false center of self-absorption. This is the self that lives with the illusion of grandiosity. This false self exaggerates the importance of appearances and perception. This is the self dominated by the ego to create a world centered on oneself.
Prayer is basically creating a journey of change from the false self to the true self. This is centering. This is the call to a contemplative approach to life.
The difficulties in prayer are rooted in this surrender that creates the movement to the true self. The journey in prayer is almost always partial and incomplete. It is a great help for us to have a clear grasp of where we are going, to the center where the true self is one with God.
This is the full development or our humanity. It is not a withdrawal from life but the full and living acceptance of life with God at the center. This is the goal of the Gospel journey of walking with Jesus.
These three virtues bring order into our prayer life. We grow in the healthy relationship to ourselves, to others and to God. For Teresa humility is the truth. We grow in humility by expanding our awareness of God and self-knowledge. Self-knowledge gives us the gradual revelation that God is God. God is the Creator and we are the creature. God is the loving and merciful creator. We are the sinful and forgiven creature.This is the basic reality of the human condition. Humility is the acceptance of this truth.
Detachment is the proper use of God’s creatures. All creation is geared to bring us into a free and loving relationship with God. Detachment helps us put all creatures in this accurate perspective.
The human heart is an idol making machine which tries to short-circuit this process by making the good things of God’s creation into a more comfortable and convenient god under our control and often in our image.
Love for our brothers and sisters is the relentless message of Jesus. From the Our Father to the mystical heights of John’s Last Supper the message is clear and forceful: love one another as I have loved you.
The ultimate challenge to the journey with Jesus is the call to love our neighbor. Likewise, there is no more dominant reality in our journey to the center than our failure to love one another.
We all have our stories of mistreatment, neglect and downright violence of our person. We create tapes of this infringement of our dignity and good name. These tapes often dominate our time of prayer.
The false self with its exaggerated sense of importance, our attachments that are often our addictions along with our personal hurts are all the deepest source of our difficulties in prayer. Our distractions almost always flow from these distortions of the right order in our seeking the face of God in prayer.
The journey to the center will be guided by humility, detachment and an all-inclusive charity.
In humility we accept ourselves in both our loveableness and brokeness. We put all things in perspective. We get real. God is God and we are the creature. This is the truth.
In detachment, we begin the struggle to place all things in their reghtful place. Their importance is measured in how they draw us closer to God. They either make us more free or enslave us. We need to be in the continual quest to be free to love.
In love for our brothers and sisters we need both humility and detachment to wipe away the fog and even the darkness of our fragmented hearts. We have to enter into the transforming search to let love win out. We must put on Christ Jesus and let our lives proclaim, “Peace be with you.”
The battle of prayer and all the difficulties it brings are engulfed in a pursuit for humility, detachment and love for one another. This is the journey to the center that will eventually overcome our difficulties in prayer.
