A lesson in prayer
When I first started praying — when I was 28, after a life of atheism — I unintentionally fell into thinking of God as a glorified wish-granting genie. My prayers were all petitions for what I wanted God to give me or my family and friends. As I got to know more about prayer and the nature of God, I began to spend a little more time thanking God for the stuff he gave me and my family and friends that I’d requested. Eventually I even moved into throwing out some open-ended requests for guidance, asking the Lord to show me his will for my life. And for a long time, that was pretty much it.
But something slowly began to change when I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours. It’s something I’ve noticed in the back of my mind for a long time, but could never articulate until I read your fascinating comments to my questions about the Psalms last week. (If you haven’t read those responses, you really should — great stuff). After reading that comment thread, something finally clicked:
One of the first things that jumped out at me as different when I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours was that I found myself saying “we” and “our” more often than “I” and “mine.” Other than when I prayed the Our Father at Mass, I wasn’t used to saying those words in prayer. I didn’t think through the implications at the time, other than to simply notice that it put me in a more humble mindset to end the day with an evening prayer like, “Almighty God, we give you give you thanks for bringing us safely to this evening hour…”
Then, around the time our new baby was born, I fell out of the habit of praying the Liturgy of the Hours. In fact, I fell out of having any dedicated prayer time at all. I simply tried to “pray without ceasing,” turning my thoughts toward God as I went through my days. That is definitely a great thing to do, and I don’t ever intend to stop doing that, but what I found was that when that was the only form of prayer I undertook each day, I drifted back into making prayer revolve around me-me-me! Prayers like “Lord, give me patience as I tell the kids not to jump on the bed for the SIXTH TIME…” are great, but when that’s what 90% of my prayers sound like I tend to fall into thinking that God is part of my plan rather than remembering that I am part of God’s plan.
It all clicked for me last Thursday, when Lauds (morning prayer) began with Psalm 143. I read:
The enemy pursues my soul;
he has crushed my life to the ground;
he has made me dwell in darkness
like the dead, long forgotten.
Therefore my spirit fails;
my heart is numb within me.
I was having a great day and feeling strong in my faith, and thought that I definitely would have skipped this Psalm if I’d come across it as part of personal prayer. “This is totally not speaking to me!” I thought, half tempted to gloss over it and move on to the next one in hopes that it would be more relevant to my life. And then I remembered something that a commenter named Jasmine said in that post about the Psalms, which was echoed by many of you throughout the comment thread:
Remember that the ‘prayer of the Church’ [the Liturgy of the Hours] is for the whole Church. You will not identify with every psalm at every moment, so when you pray them think of all of the people in the world praying with you who DO identify with the psalm. Pray for them and on their behalf.
It all finally clicked. For the first time, I think I really understood the power of the Liturgy of the Hours as the universal prayer of the Church. My mind immediately flashed to everyone all over the world who opened their day with the exact same prayers as I did that morning — my priest, all the priests and nuns in the world, all bishops, the Pope, my long-lost cousin the monk, all my friends and the other laypeople throughout the world who pray the Hours — and the wall that I’d unintentionally put up around myself was smashed.
As I had yawned through the psalmist’s cry of anguish, someone out there could barely utter those same words through trembling lips and tear-stung eyes. I thought of all the people praying the Hours in that state, and for the first time was conscious of our deep connectedness as we prayed in unison as part of the mystical Body of Christ. I began offering my prayers for them, which then led me to expand my prayers to anyone else in the world who was in pain at that moment. As my heart swelled to think of the great drama playing out all over the world that morning of which I was only a small part, I thought back to my words at the beginning of the office — “But this Psalm doesn’t have anything to do with me!” — and realized that I had learned something critically important about prayer: It’s not all about me.
AREWP Week 34: Prayer and spiritual dry spells
[AREWP stands for A Reckless Experiment With Prayer.]
Back in the first few months of 2008, a theme that I wrote about frequently was my “Reckless Experiment With Prayer,” which I originally talked about in this post. The idea was that I’d structure my daily activities around prayer times instead of vice versa. I called it “reckless” because I was supposedly soooooo busy with three children in diapers that I didn’t have a single extra minute to spare for prayer, and the “experiment” was that I would take a risk and just see what happened if I put prayer first above everything else.
As I mentioned in my many posts on the subject (you can find them here — scroll down to see them all), it turned out to be one of the most life-changing things I’ve ever done. It gave my days some desperately needed structure, and brought a tidal wave of grace into my life and my family’s lives. I haven’t mentioned it in a few months, so I occasionally get asked: do you still pray the Liturgy of the Hours?
Here’s the short answer: yes.
Here’s the long answer…
Yes, although I can’t say that I never skip an office out of forgetfulness or laziness; nor can I say that there haven’t been entire days that I didn’t pray a single office. To be honest, it is not nearly as easy as or fun as it used to be back when it was something new and different and I felt on fire for my faith. There are days that I feel so distant from God and am so immersed in selfishness that it’s downright painful to open up that prayer book and take 10 minutes for Lauds. And that is one of the reasons that I think it’s beyond coincidence that I felt called to start doing this just before I ended up in the spiritual doldrums.
One of the first lessons I learned in this experiment was that there’s only one way to pray the Liturgy of the Hours: to think of prayer as the only thing you’re definitely going to get done that day, to mentally prioritize everything else as a distant second. On a practical level, I found it interesting that 10 out of 10 times that I approached my days this way, I was far more organized and productive than on the days that I let prayer slide to put more “important” things first (I talked about that major lesson more here). However, I found that the discipline of putting prayer in the #1 priority slot had an even bigger effect on a spiritual level.
Especially during these days of spiritual dryness, there’s been something powerful about putting prayer first even when I get nothing out of it in terms of feelings or emotions, even when I’m so immersed in worldly concerns that I feel like anything and everything is more important than sitting in front of a book and reading Psalms and other prayers. Something about giving God one of my most precious assets — my time — has kept me close to him in a different, deeper way.
I remember how painful prayer used to be when I wasn’t sure if I believed in God. Other little sacrifices I made for this unseen deity at least had some worldly payoff if he didn’t exist: donating money to Christian charities helped people do good works in the world, reading the Bible was educational as an important book in Western history, and we did meet some great new people at Mass. I was making some sacrifices for God, but my bets were hedged…just in case.
But prayer was different.
The first few times I tried make room in my day to talk in God’s general direction, I feared that I was wasting the ultimate nonrenewable resource: time. If God didn’t exist, or if he was some distant deity who had no connection to the day-to-day affairs of humans, then prayer was a waste of precious time that I could never get back. There’s no worldly payoff to talking to yourself with your eyes closed and your hands folded (not for me, anyway — if you say there’s some benefit to the meditative aspects of it because you find deep insights within yourself, you haven’t heard my prayers). Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I believe now that my (albeit grudging) willingness to give God some of my time, even though I wasn’t sure he existed, was a critical step that softened my heart and cracked open a channel of grace that would help me get to the next level in the conversion process.
Though I never have doubts about God’s existence anymore, I’ve found a similar lesson applies in this time of fear and worry.
I haven’t been great about bringing glory to God in my daily life lately. For a while there it came naturally to me to meditate on Christ’s sufferings any time I felt sorry for myself, or to give thanks to God for my many blessings when I was tempted to complain about some inconvenience. Now I pretty much just feel sorry for myself and complain about inconveniences. (I’m working on that.) But one thing I can do, perhaps one of the biggest sacrifices I can make for Christ in my daily life, is to give him some of my time.
I might not be overflowing with zeal and pleasant emotions like I was a few months ago. I might not feel enveloped in God’s love like I sometimes did earlier this year. Yet every time I choose pray Lauds instead of getting a head start on the breakfast dishes, or pick up my prayer book for Vespers instead of checking email one extra time, I am aware that I am intimately close to God in an important way, even if I don’t feel it.
AREWP Week 12: Refocusing
[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]
I’ll just come out and say it: last week was a disaster.
Between a teething seven-month-old, a teething 20-month-old, and disastrous setbacks with potty trainwreck
One of the emotions I felt most strongly throughout the flameout of last week was simply surprise. “How has this happened?” I kept wondering. Things had been going to amazingly well ever since I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours. I’d had other tough weeks since then where I didn’t fall off track with prayer and maintained a sense of peace even throughout tough days. I kept wondering what had changed, what it was that derailed not only my prayer life but the wonderful sense of peace I’d found in daily life. After about the third or fourth time I forgot to pray one of the major hours because I was distracted by something else, I finally realized:
My mentality had totally, fundamentally changed.
For the first couple of months that I structured my days around the Liturgy of the Hours I never forgot to pray, because that was the purpose, the very center of my days. To give you some specific examples, here is a glimpse into my mentality throughout the past few months when thinking about what I needed to do the next day. Let’s use examples from Thursday evenings, when, say, vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor were on my to-do list for the next day:
WEEK 1: “Tomorrow my goal is to serve God first and foremost. I will observe the universal prayer times of the Liturgy of the Hours — even when it’s not convenient for me or what I want to do — and thus anchor my days with prayer. No matter what else happens, these prayers will get said. Hopefully the structure of having my days guided by set times of turning to God will help me accomplish the other things I’d like to get done, like vacuuming the living room and mopping the kitchen floor.”
WEEK 8: “Tomorrow my goal is to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, but I really need to make sure I vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor too.”
WEEK 10: “Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor. Oh, yeah, and I need to remember to pray too.”
WEEK 11: “Tomorrow my goal is to vacuum the living room and mop the kitchen floor.”
I was so amazed at the practical benefits of having my days revolve around prayer that I slipped into the mentality of seeing those practical things as the end I was trying to achieve — and it all fell apart.
The reason my house was so much more clean and orderly after I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours was not because I’d found a great organizational routine. It was because the way I approached daily life had fundamentally changed. Praying Lauds, Matins and Vespers at their scheduled times was a great exercise in obedience to God: it was never convenient to stop what I was doing and get out the prayer book. It always involved setting aside something else I felt like I should be doing. But in making these little sacrifices I was reminded, three times a day, that life is not about what I feel like doing, that I need to let go of what I want to get done and foster only a calm trust in God.
The grace and peace that entered my life after I started living this way set off a domino effect where everything else fell into place. The order that these prayer times brought to my days meant that housework fell into a gentle rhythm, and it was easy to fall into a routine without even having to think much about it. As I mentioned here, since my working hours were cut down to make more time for prayer, I had more energy to pick up the pace in the times that I did work. To my great delight, the result was a cleaner, more orderly house.
But then the temptation arose to take a shortcut: I loved having my household running so smoothly, so I began to elbow God aside and focus on that alone. As I showed in the example above, the thought process of “Tomorrow I will pray; and vacuum and sweep if it’s God’s will” drifted into “tomorrow I will vacuum and sweep; and pray if it’s Jen’s will.”
This weekend I was reminded of a quote from Pope Benedict that I excerpted in greater detail in my first post about scheduling my days around prayer:
When God is regarded as a secondary matter that can be set aside temporarily or permanently on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things that come to nothing.
[Excuse me for a moment while I go tattoo that on my forehead...OK, I'm back.]
At the end of last week I felt like everything was in shambles. I felt like there was no way I could ever catch up on all that I had to do and regain a sense of peace in my daily life. With a laser-like focus on all those important practical matters I needed to take care of, I sat on the couch with my head in my hands, feeling crushed under the weight of it all. I looked at all the notes scribbled on my to-do list, on the disaster area that was my living room, and thought, “I can’t do this.” And in that moment I realized: it’s true. I can’t. I can’t do it all. I need to let go.
And when I did just that, when I set aside my to-do list and stopped asking myself “How can I get X, Y and Z tasks done tomorrow?” and started asking myself only, “How can I pray tomorrow?” I felt a weight lift from my shoulders, and knew that I was back on the path to peace.
AREWP Day 44: Balance requires sacrifice
[AREWP stands for "A Reckless Experiment With Prayer." This is part of an ongoing series about bringing peace to my daily life. You can read the other posts on this subject here (scroll down).]
Last night my husband and I were sitting in the living room after the kids went to bed, chatting about our days over little bowls of chocolate ice cream, and I caught a glimpse of the half-folded basket of laundry I’d set aside in the laundry room. Then I thought of those last three bills I needed to pay, and remembered that I never did get around to replying to that one email. My instinct was to get up and meander over to my desk or to the laundry basket, but I sunk back into the couch and kept chatting with my husband instead. And I thought, “So this is what balance is like.”
When I used to make my semi-monthly proclamations that I desperately needed balance in my life, what I was really saying was, “I want to do all the same stuff I’m doing now, but just not be stressed about it!” Yet another huge lesson I’ve learned from this experiment of scheduling life around prayer (instead of vice versa) is this:
Balance requires sacrifice.
I know, to a lot of people that’s as insightful as saying breathing requires inhaling, but it was actually a revelation to me. Before my commitment to make the workday end with Vespers, I would have spent that time after the kids went to bed shuffling around to try to finish the laundry, pay those last few bills, reply to that email, and undoubtedly get sidetracked with all sorts of other things along the way. It would have felt too indulgent or wasteful to just put my feet up and spend a whole hour chatting with my husband! Especially because of my tendency to procrastinate, I would have felt like I “had to” forgo relaxation time in the evening to make up for not getting enough done during the day. But the realization that a natural life is a life with hard stops, that it is only in recent years through modern technology that we have even been able to throw our lives so far out of balance by extending our working hours at will, changed everything.
These days, leisurely breakfast time ends and high-energy activity time begins with Lauds (Morning Prayer) at 9:30; high-energy activity time ends and naptime/desk work begins with the Office of Readings at 2:00; and I do one final sweep to get any lingering projects to a stopping point before the whole workday comes to a close with Vespers (Evening Prayer) at 6:00. Do I always have everything done by the time prayer time rolls around? Nope. Am I often tempted to keep working into the evening to make up for not getting enough done during the day? Absolutely. But, I have realized, such is a life of balance.
Back in this post I speculated that the reason that pre-electricity generations spoke of a life of peaceful rhythm and natural balance is because, for example, a housewife living in 1890 couldn’t do laundry at 10:00 at night if she didn’t get to it during the day; that by virtue of having built-in hard stops like sunset and community-centered activities, they were forced to sacrifice a lot of the things they wanted to get done and simply rest. Mimicking this life as best I can, by allowing my day to be broken into times of work and times of rest by forces larger than myself, has indeed forced me to sacrifice a lot of the things I’d like to get done. And it has given me a life of balance.
I suppose it might technically be possible to achieve such a nice rhythm by using something other than prayer to provide hard stops; but, for me, I doubt that anything else would work. Here in our 24/7 world, there’s so much pressure let your life slide out of balance, to sign up for “just one more” activity, to get “just one more” thing done each day, that with my notorious lack of willpower I’m sure I would have backslid into my old ways long before now with any other type of routine. But by anchoring my days around God by joining in with the universal prayer of the Church, by letting the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours be the guiding rhythm of my life, three times a day I am reminded that I only have one real to-do list, and it is short; that the little sacrifices I make to achieve balance are minuscule in the grand scheme of things; that my time is not my own anyway.
To be sure, I don’t mean to imply that my life is now stress-free or that I don’t ever struggle with challenging days anymore (anyone who read this post or this post knows that that’s certainly not the case). But I will say that it all feels more “natural” than before. Letting go of the temptation to make every hour a working hour, structuring my days around prayer instead of around the frantic pace of the world, might not have made all the stress in my life go away, but it has brought me times of guilt-free rest to act as a counterweight to the challenging times. Life has a gentle rhythm that wasn’t there before. Even though there are days when it’s painful to sacrifice a couple items from my to-do list that I wanted to get done, even though I have more responsibilities now than ever before in my life, I feel that after all these years, I have finally found balance.