Prayer: Because sometimes you need to be dog-whispered
Back when we had cable, I used to be a big fan of the Dog Whisperer show. I don’t even have a dog, but it was fascinating to see how Cesar Millan could take all these bad dogs and turn them into happy, obedient pets. One of his most common techniques is to pinch a dog quickly on the side of its neck while making a sound that is hard to convey in writing, but goes something like, PRSSSSCHT!!!
By mimicking the corrective nip that the top dog in a pack might use to keep his subordinate canines in line, Millan gets the dog’s attention and snaps him out of whatever he might have been fixating on. It’s amazing how well it works. In one of the last episodes I saw, this one dog had a problem with obsessing about rocks. He would run up to one, growl at it, bite it, run around it, bite it some more, and this could go on for almost an hour. Normally he was pretty good about listening to his owner, but when he’d come across a rock, it was all over. You could practically hear the dog thinking, “NO SHUT UP DON’T TALK TO ME I’VE GOT TO GET THIS ROCK! ROCK! IT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD! ROCK! ROCK! ROCK!” And then Millan would dog-whisper him with that PRSSSSCHT!!! thing, and he’d break out of it and look up at his master like, “Oh, hey, sorry about that! I guess that rock isn’t that important after all.”
I hate to admit this, but the dog kind of reminds me of me.
Whenever I’m good about sticking to regular prayer times, it breaks me out of whatever I’m fixating on. In fact, I usually don’t notice that I am fixating on anything until I stop what I’m doing and focus on God. I’ll be walking around, just like the dog, saying, “NO SHUT UP DON’T TALK TO ME I’VE GOT TO GET THIS ROCK! ROCK! IT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD! ROCK! ROCK! ROCK!” Just replace “rock” with some item from my to-do list, and that’s me.
Then the hard stop of prayer time comes along, and it’s like Cesar Millan’s PRSSSSCHT!!!
When prayer time first approaches, I shrink away, convinced that I simply must keep obsessing about whatever it is that has captured my attention at the moment. But when I actually enter into silence, both internal and external, it’s such a drastic change from my normal mode of living that it startles me into a new frame of mind. Contemplating the eternal instead of fixating on the temporal requires such a huge shift of mental gears that it breaks me out of whatever short-sighted rut I’d been in. Like the dumb dog, I finally stop chewing on my silly worries of the moment, and pay attention to what my Master is trying to tell me.
How I pray when I don’t have time to pray
There’s nothing like daily prayer time. Over and over again, I’ve found that when I make the necessary sacrifices to structure my schedule around prayer (instead of vice versa), my small efforts are repaid tenfold by the tremendous graces I receive.
But I can’t always get there. I usually blame it on not having time, though that excuse is a little suspect since I always manage to find abundant time to mess around on the internet. Anyway, whether it’s due to laziness, fatigue, a lack of faith, being overwhelmed, truly not having time, or some combination of all of the above, there are seasons when regular prayer time just doesn’t happen.
With my personality type, there’s a temptation to let that mean no prayer at all: I am the master at letting perfection be the enemy of the good, not doing anything at all if I can’t do it the “right” way. When I let this happen, it’s always detrimental to my spiritual life. Though I do try to “pray without ceasing,” offering up my actions throughout the day to God, it has not been my experience that that is a substitute for dedicated time spent focusing exclusively on the Lord. As my spiritual director always pointed out, prayer is about building a relationship. Praying as I do my work is like when my husband and I work alongside each other managing the household chaos: that’s a wonderful, necessary part of maintaining a healthy relationship, but if we never spent any time alone, our relationship would suffer.
So I’ve found it to be extremely important to make sure that I’m getting some dedicated prayer time in on a somewhat regular basis, even if it’s not quite as much as I’d like. The most helpful advice I’ve ever come across in this department is from Fr. Michael Scanlan’s book Appointment with God (which is out of print now, but I ordered a copy by phone from the Franciscan University Bookstore). The book is full of great advice about taking your prayer life to the next level, but the biggest thing I took away from it was the idea of making prayer appointments.
Fr. Scanlan points out that when we want to make sure we meet up with someone, we don’t just say, “Yeah, I’ll see you sometime.” Rather, we name a specific time and place the meeting will occur, which allows us to protect that time from getting displaced by our busy schedules.
I already had a routine where each Sunday I’d sit down and write out my weekly schedule, transferring whatever is on my Google Calendar to my handy day planner from Faith Calendars. After reading Fr. Scanlan’s book, I added a new element to this routine: I’d write down my appointments with God too. I’d take a moment to prayerfully think about when and how I should pray this week, then note that time on my calendar. Some weeks I might feel called to step it up and include serious prayer time every day; other weeks I might feel like just once or twice would be about all I could realistically handle. Not only do I note the time I’m going to pray, but the type of prayer as well (e.g. Gospel reflection, Rosary, silent meditation, etc.)
The process is actually fun! I might feel moved to get up early on Tuesday to pray a full Rosary at 6:30, to reflect on the Gospels at 2:30 PM on Thursday, and to wrap up the week with some Bible reading at 10:00 on Friday night. It’s always interesting to see how much of what type of prayer I feel moved to include that week. And when these “appointments” are written on my calendar, I actually tend to keep them.
This idea has really helped me keep my prayer life from fizzling out altogether when I’m in phases where daily prayer time isn’t happening. What are your tips for carving out time for prayer during busy seasons of life?
Praying like you’re illiterate
Yesterday I hit a level of exhaustion like I have only rarely known before. This whole “third trimester” thing just is not working out for me this time around, and after a morning of huffing and puffing around the house to keep up with the kids (including the most spirited two-year-old God has ever created) I was on the brink of some kind of physical collapse. I was just about to toss an open box of granola bars on the kitchen floor, stagger to the couch and count on the kids’ survival instincts to do the rest, when the phone rang with Yaya‘s number on caller ID. Her east Texas accent sounding more glorious than a chorus of angels, she wanted to know if the kids could come play at her house for the afternoon.
She came and rounded them up, and the moment I heard the front door shut I poured myself onto our most comfortable chair and just sat there for a moment. I had a quiet house and free time. What to do? A nap was definitely on the agenda, but I was overcome with the urge to pray. My prayer life has been less than great (read: almost nonexistent) lately, so it felt right to use some of these God-given moments of peace to spend a little time really focusing on the Lord.
But when it came to actual execution, I hit a wall. Ever since reading The Better Part I’ve seen great fruit from praying through the Gospels, but that was out of the question. Nothing short of an impending meteor strike was going to get me off that chair, and I couldn’t have mustered up the mental energy to read even if my Bible had been close by. I tried simply lifting my heart to the Lord, but the effect was the spiritual equivalent of making a sound like “UUUUUNNNNNGH.” I know, I know: God knows what’s in our hearts, there’s no such thing as a “right” or “wrong” prayer, our UUUUUNNNNNGH‘s honor God just as much as eloquent soliloquies, etc. I get that. In fact, normally I would count that kind of simian effort to be a pretty good prayer day for me, but that afternoon I yearned for something more. For my own sake, I craved a deeper understanding of who God is and what he wants from our lives. To break myself out of my fixation on my own discomfort, I needed that reality check you get when you steep yourself in a mystery of the Rosary or in the words of the Gospels and refresh your understanding of divine truths. But it looked like it wasn’t going to happen that day.
And then a thought popped into mind: my icon!
Hanging on the wall directly to my right was a large framed image of the Christ the Teacher icon (this one created by my cousin the monk). My whole body relaxed as soon as I saw it, and I fixed my tired eyes on its precisely-drawn lines. This was the answer to the prayer I hadn’t even thought to say.
I didn’t understand icons until relatively recently. I thought it was just another style of art, and since it wasn’t to my taste, I had no interest in the subject. But then I was reunited with my long-lost cousin who is an iconographer, whom I mentioned above, and I realized that I had completely misunderstood this sacred form of communication. The creation of icons goes back to the very first centuries of Christianity, back when many of the faithful were illiterate. It’s a way of explaining theology through visual symbolism, and iconographers follow ancient prototypes with very detailed specifications when creating an icon (for example, and image search on Christ the Teacher shows how similar all the representations are). This is why iconographers fast when they are working on a project, and why icons are said to be “written” rather than “painted” — each one contains a small book’s worth of information about sacred truths.
As I sat there in a heap on the chair, I got lost in all the messages conveyed in the image on my wall. Christ’s blue cloak symbolizes his divine nature, and the crimson color of the garment underneath is to remind us of the human blood that he shed for us…for me. I looked at the halo that surrounds his head and noticed the Greek letters, which express “I am Who Am,” the name of God in Exodus 3:14. And yet the letters are in the shape of a cross, which hit home the shattering truth that the unfathomable “I Am” allowed himself to be subject to human torture. Jesus’ fingers are bent in a blessing, and form the letters IC XC, a monogram for the name of Jesus Christ in Greek, which prompted me to mediate for a moment on the power of his holy name. My eyes drifted up to meet the eyes of Christ, represented as large and open per the format of this icon, which reminded me that at this very moment I am being seen my God himself. For a long time I let that idea sink in, just silently absorbed that feeling that someone is watching you, and wondered what my life looked like through the eyes of God.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I don’t know how long I sat there soaking up each aspect of the icon, but when I was finished I felt as enriched as if I had read chapters of sacred theology. Something about contemplating the truths of the faith without words, by seeing alone, engaged a whole different part of my brain, and made me consider these truths on a more primal, less intellectual level than I normally do.
I don’t think I really understood icons until I found myself in such an exhausted state yesterday. I suddenly felt a special kinship with all my brothers and sisters in Christ throughout the ages who have not had the educational background or the free time or the resources to be able to sit down and study the Word of God in written form. What a gift icons must have been for all the people who lived before the printing press and thus couldn’t afford a hand-copied Bible, or who were illiterate, or who were just too fatigued to read at the end of a long day of toil. They’d hear the Scriptures read at Mass, and then could go home to their icons and savor those same truths, spelled out in simple visual form that even the most uneducated, tired person could understand.
It makes sense that there’s less of a demand for icons here in this age of literacy and wealth, when everyone can afford to own a Bible, and most people have the energy, free time and educational background to be able to study it. But, as I learned yesterday, even those of us who don’t “have to” pray with icons shouldn’t overlook them, because you can discover a whole new treasure chest of spiritual riches when you learn to pray without words.
The 7 Habits of People Who Place Radical Trust in God
I read a lot of biographies and memoirs about inspiring people who place radical trust in God. (By “radical” I don’t mean reckless or imprudent, but am referring to the difficult, very counter-cultural act of recognizing God’s sovereignty over every area of our lives. More on that here.) From He Leadeth Me to God’s Smuggler, Mother Angelica to The Heavenly Man to The Shadow of His Wings, these true stories are about people from all walks of the Christian life: Catholic and Protestant, consecrated religious and lay people, men and women. And yet they all have distinct similarities in their approaches to life and the Lord.
I found it fascinating to see what common threads could be found in the lives of these incredible people who place so much trust in the Lord, and thought I’d share in case others find it inspiring as well.
1. They accept suffering
One of the most powerful things I’ve read in recent memory is Brother Yun’s story of being a persecuted pastor in China, as recounted in the book The Heavenly Man. After facing weeks of torture, including electrocution, starvation, beatings, and having needles shoved under his fingernails, he was thrown in a box that was four feet long, three feet wide, and four feet high, where he would stay indefinitely. The day after he was put in this mini cell, he felt prompted to pray for a Bible — a ridiculous idea, considering that many people were in prison at that very moment for being in possession of such contraband. Yet he prayed anyway. And, inexplicably, the guards threw a Bible into his cell the next morning. He writes:
I knelt down and wept, thanking the Lord for this great gift. I could scarcely believe my dream had come true! No prisoner was ever allowed to have a Bible or any Christian literature, yet, strangely, God provided a Bible for me! Through this incident the Lord showed me that regardless of men’s evil plans for me, he had not forgotten me and was in control of my life.
Now, the less saintly among us (cough-cough) might have reacted to that a little differently. Had I been tortured and thrown in a coffin-like cell, my reaction to receiving a Bible would have likely been more along the lines of, “Thanks for the Bible, Lord, but could we SEE ABOUT GETTING ME OUT OF THIS METAL BOX FIRST?!?!” I wouldn’t have even “counted” the Bible as an answered prayer since my main prayer — reducing my physical suffering — had gone unanswered.
Yet what I see over and over again in people like Brother Yun is that they have crystal clarity on the fact that suffering is not the worst evil — sin is. Yes, they would prefer not to suffer, and do sometimes pray for the relief of suffering. But they prioritize it lower than the rest of us do — they focus far more on not sinning than on not suffering. They have a laser focus on getting themselves and others to heaven. In Brother Yun’s case, he saw through that answered prayer that God was allowing him to grow spiritually and minister to his captors, so his circumstances of suffering in an uncomfortable cell became almost irrelevant to him.
2. They accept the inevitability of death
Similar to the above, people who place great trust in God can only do so with a heaven-centered worldview. They think in terms of eternity, not in terms of calendar years. Their goal is not to maximize their time on earth, but rather to get themselves and as many other people as possible to heaven. And if God can best do that by shortening their lifespans, they accept that.
The Shadow of His Wings is filled with jaw-dropping stories of Fr. Goldmann’s miraculous escapes from death during World War II, which begs the question, “What about all the people who didn’t escape death?” Fr. Goldmann would probably respond by saying that God saving him from death was not the blessing in and of itself — after all, every single one of us will die eventually. The blessing was saving him from death so that he could continue his ministry bringing the Gospel to the Nazis. He eventually died while building a ministry in Japan, and presumably accepted that God would bring good from his passing, even though there was undoubtedly more work he wanted to do.
3. They have daily appointments with God
I have never heard of a person who had a deep, calm trust in the Lord who did not set aside time for focused prayer every day. Both in the books I’ve read and in real life, I’ve noticed that people like this always spend at least a few moments — and up to an hour or two if circumstances permit — focused on nothing but prayer, every day. Also, they tend to do it first thing in the morning, centering themselves in Christ before tackling anything else the day may bring.
4. In prayer, they listen more than they talk
I’ve written before about my amazement that really holy people seem to get their prayers answered more often than the rest of us. I’d heard enough stories of people praying for something very specific, then receiving it, that I started to wonder if they were psychic or God just liked them more than the rest of us or something. What I eventually realized is that their ideas about what to pray for came from the Holy Spirit in the first place, because they spent so much time seeking God’s will for them, day in and day out.
So, to use the example of a famous story from Mother Angelica’s biography, she had a satellite dish delivery man at the door who needed $600,000 or he was going to return the dish, thus killing all the plans for the new station. She ran to the chapel and prayed, and a guy she’d never met randomly called and wanted to donate $600,000. Her prayer wasn’t answered because she had a personal interest in television and just really, really wanted it, but because she had correctly discerned God’s plan that she was to start a television station on this particular day.
5. They limit distractions
Of all the amazing stories in God’s Smuggler, one of the lines that jumped out to me the most in the book was in the epilogue, when the authors talk about how Brother Andrew’s work has continued in 21st century:
“I won’t even consider installing one of those call waiting monstrosities,” he exclaimed, “that interrupt one phone conversation to announce another.” Technology, Andrew says, makes us far too accessible to the demands and pressures of the moment. “Our first priority should be listening in patience and silence for the voice of God.”
Far too accessible to the demands and pressures of the moment. That line has haunted me ever since I read it. I love technology, but it does come with a huge temptation to feel a general increase in urgency in our lives: I have to reply to that email! Respond to that comment on my wall on Facebook! Ret-tweet that tweet! Read that direct message! Listen to that voicemail! Here in the connected age, we are constantly bombarded with demands on our attention. Periods of silence, where we can cultivate inner stillness and wait for the promptings of the Holy Spirit, are increasingly rare.
One thing that all the people in these books have in common is that they had very little of this pressure of false urgency. It’s hard to imagine Fr. Ciszek coming up with the breathtaking insights about God’s will that he shared in He Leadeth Me with his iPhone buzzing alerts every few minutes, or Brother Yun seeing the subtle beauty of God’s plan in the midst of persecution while keeping his Twitter status updated on a minute-by-minute basis.
6. They submit their discernment to others
People who have a long history of watching the way the Lord works in their lives notice that he often speaks through holy friends, family members and clergy. If they discern that God is calling them to something, especially if it’s something big, they ask trusted Christian confidantes to pray about the matter and see if they discern the same thing. And when others warn them not to follow a certain path — especially if it’s a spouse, confessor or spiritual director — they take those indicators very seriously.
7. They offer the Lord their complete, unhesitating obedience
One of my favorite parts of God’s Smuggler is when Brother Andrew got a visit from a man named Karl de Graaf who was part of a prayer group in which people often spent hours of time in prayer, most of it listening in silence:
I went out to the front stoop, and there was Karl de Graaf. “Hello!” I said, surprised.
“Hello, Andy. Do you know how to drive?”
“Drive?”
“An automobile.”
“No,” I said, bewildered. “No, I don’t.”
“Because last night in our prayers we had a word from the Lord about you. It’s important for you to be able to drive.”
“Whatever on earth for?” I said. “I’ll never own a car, that’s for sure.”
“Andrew,” Mr. de Graaf spoke patiently, as to a slow-witted student, “I’m not arguing for the logic of the case. I’m just passing on the message.” And with that, he was striding across the bridge.
Despite his initial hesitation, Brother Andrew discerned that this was something that God was calling him to do, so he learned to drive. It seemed like a complete waste of time, an utterly illogical use of his resources, but he was obedient to the Lord’s call. I won’t spoil what happened next for those of you who plan to read the book, but let’s just say that shortly after he received his license, it turned out to be critical to the future of his ministry (which eventually brought the Gospel to thousands of people behind the Iron Curtain) that he know how to drive.
I often think of how Mr. de Graaf responded when Brother Andrew was scratching his head about this odd message: “That’s the excitement in obedience,” he said. “Finding out later what God had in mind.”
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Obviously we can’t grow closer to God by aping the actions of others, but I find lists like this helpful as a starting point for reflection on my own spiritual progress. I hope you found it helpful as well!