#7: Prayer

I used to really enjoy prayer, but now I find it so dry and boring.  What happened?  Am I doing something wrong? 

I find it comforting that almost every saint confesses to having had a strong aversion to prayer at sometime in their life.  Even St. Teresa of Avila, known as our patron saint of prayer, after an initial deep fervor experienced 18 years of absolute boredom.  She said that sometimes she would have rather scrubbed the bathroom floor than spend a half an hour in silent prayer!   But even though she spent most of her life in the throes of the desert with only a trickle of consolation keeping her faith life alive, she still declares emphatically, “Believe me – and do not let anyone deceive you by showing you a road other than that of prayer.”  She said when it comes to prayer, we must be determined…in fact, we must be determined to be determined and allow nothing to derail us or discourage us from our determination to pray.

Mother Theresa’s journals, to the surprise of many people, recently revealed the same experience of dryness.  She says she had some sixty years of feelings of emptiness and desolation in prayer.   The pattern that we discover about prayer when we study the great saints and mystics, is that “prayer is easy only for beginners and for those who are already saints, but during all the long years in between its hard work.” (Rolheiser)  The “dark night of the soul” is a reality for most, if not all believers at one time or another.

So, if we find our prayer to be dry more often than not, we should take heart…we are in mighty good company. 
The great mystics are united in saying that once the early honeymoon stage has past its very difficult to believe that anything meaningful is happening  in our prayer, but we need to continue to “show up” which is really all God asks of us.   I call my daily private prayer “butt-in-seat-time.”   I do my best just to show up and be quiet before God no matter how strong the urge is not to.  I don’t have a clue what happens during that time, but I trust God does.  An illustration from Mark Link:

A farmer and his family sit down for their evening meal together and during grace, the Father asks God to bring heavy rains on their newly planted crops of corn.  So the daughter prays fervently that there will be a heavy down pour, and sure enough, the Lord delivers a week’s worth of heavy storms.   The daughter happily notices the little sprouts beginning to pop out of the soil and is thankful.  Then one evening the following week the Father prays that God will make the rains cease.  The young girl is utterly confused, and after the prayer she asks her Father “Why in the world would we pray that the rain stop when it’s obviously helping the corn to grow?”  The Father explained that “once the corn sprouts, a dry period is helpful to the life of the corn.  The reason is to force the corn’s roots to grow downward in search of water, rather than stay on the surface.  Unless the root of the corn grows deep down to the water table  and becomes anchored in the ground, the corn will either wither and dry when the heat of summer sets in, since it will have no way to draw up water or the shallow rooted stalks will be swept away with the strong winds and storms that are sure to come. 

A profound metaphor for the ups and downs of our of prayer life I think…

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