PRAYER IS PAINFUL

Most of us would have to confess that our spiritual life is not what we want it to be nor what we know it should be. We wish we had more time to give to prayer and spiritual reading. The Bible may even have a prominent place in our homes but it barely gets opened or certainly not opened and read enough. Our self-discipline, as far as our spiritual life is concerned, leaves much to be desired.

But we do not give up. Every once in a while we make a concerted effort to spend as much time on the spiritual part of our lives as we do the physical in an effort to lead a balanced life. A spiritual life, spirituality, begins with prayer, setting aside certain times during the day when we actually do pray, whether from a book of prayer or use words we have memorized over the years or simply utter words that come from the heart.

Herein is the problem. Sister Joan Chittister, in her In a High Spiritual Season, writes this: “Spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeats. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer sustains us on the way. Pray for the grace it will take to continue what you would like to quit.”

Isn’t that the truth? We pray because we find something missing in our lives; we find a staleness there, a same-old same-old that craves for something new or at least something refreshing. But when we pray, really pray, when we are in tuned to the words we utter, we find ourselves dealing with the nitty-gritty, with so much of what we don’t like about ourselves and our lives and the reason we felt moved to pray in the first place.

As Sister Joan says, prayer unmasks. It forces us to see the real person and not the person we pretend to be or others think us to be. We’re not that bad but have too many faults that cannot be overlooked and certainly not excused. Prayer forces us to speak the truth about ourselves. If and when we listen to that truth and take in seriously, we begin a conversion process. In fact, the more serious we become about our prayer life, the more we are impelled to making those changes in our lives our prayer recognizes need to be made.

Once we head down that road, once we begin that journey, it is prayer that “sustains us on the way.” Yet, as we know from experience, that road so often quickly comes to an end. Our prayer exposes too much of us, demands too much of us, wants to make changes we are not ready or even willing to make, and so we stop praying.

Prayer is painful because it demands that we take our spiritual lives seriously. When we do, that will demand that we make changes in the rest of our lives, changes that will discomfit us and perhaps even make the lives of those we love uncomfortable.

Jesus is our example. His deep-seated prayer life governed what he said and did. That made everyone else uncomfortable because they saw in him the life they were to live. It took God’s grace for Jesus always to be a person of prayer and never quit even when the going got rough. It takes that same grace for us as well. Pray for that grace.