Let me say it outright: I don’t have a prayer discipline any more.
For years, I did. Prayer was as much a part of my daily routine as brushing my teeth after breakfast. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I got bored. Maybe I outgrew what I was doing. Maybe I figured out I was getting cavities anyway, so what was the point?
Realizing I wasn’t praying scared me. So I did what any good recovering intellectual does when something troubling happens: I read up on it. I learned about a lot of cool ways that people experience prayer. I also learned that as a struggling pray-er I was in pretty good company. Priests and monks and saints have written about dry spells when prayer wouldn’t come. Most of them came to believe, from the other side of their dry spells, that this was a growth spurt in their relationship with God. I read that, over time, our relationship with God may change and the ways we communicate in that relationship may change, as well.
One day I heard something that changed not just my intellectual understanding of what was going on, but changed the way I actually experienced that period of distance from God. Someone said, “My life is a prayer.”
That meant, to me, that everything I did could be prayer, if I chose to see it that way. When I heard that, it gave me permission to let go of what I thought prayer ought to be so it could become a unique expression of a real relationship with God. For the first time, I really “got” the idea of praying without ceasing.
Prayer may be the silence that is pure contentment or the dark days when all I feel is the absence of God. Prayer may be a yearning so deep it can’t be expressed in words. It may express itself through service. It may be a song I can’t not sing or a poem that flows through me from nowhere. Maybe if I give up trying to control my prayer time, it leaves space for God to pray through me and express Divine desire for us and our world. Maybe prayer can become less about what I’m saying to God and more about what God is saying to me.
What a wonderfully simple thought — my ife is a prayer. Sure does make it easier for those of us who doubt ‘we’re getting it right.’
I still vote for you Most Spiritually Improved!!
Love you!