Around this time of year, people think about New Year’s
resolutions. Some of us even make them and some of us even keep them. There
must have been many years when I resolved to pray more or to pray better or
just to pray. I won’t embarrass myself by reporting the results of those
promises in this post. Over time, however, I came up with a few magnificent
excuses for not praying. Here are just a few.
If I pray regularly for a while and then
stop, God will be mad at me. Here I am attributing to God my very own
prized pettiness. If someone invites me for lunch on several occasions and then
omits to do so, I feel angry, hurt, rejected. Apparently, in my heart, I think
God is as neurotic as I am.
There are too many choices in praying.
There’s the daily office; there’s contemplative prayer; there’s praying with
Scripture; there is simply talking to God in my own words. Which one is best?
God deserves the best. Here is an example of thinly disguised pride. Certainly
someone like me, with my education and liturgical nous can only pray the best way.
I might not pray properly. I spent
twelve years in Catholic school and can clearly remember pictures of saints in
rapturous prayer. Eyes cast heavenward, hands devoutly folded, kneeling
upright, these men and women, and often boys and girls, were clearly in a
religious transport of which I knew myself to be incapable. Better get a bit
holier and then pray. As Paul tells us and as I have quoted on this blog
before, “We do not know how to pray as we ought…” Of course I won’t pray
properly. No one will. It matters not to God.
I should save my praying for when I felt
deeply moved to do so. Surely the best prayers came from deep feelings,
great need or profound understanding. If I pray on a regular basis, even when
I’m not “feeling it,” I might use up my prayer energy and then not have it when
I need it or when my state of holiness requires it. This notion that there is just so much
religion that a person is allotted has plagued me for many years. I know it’s
wrong, but I’ve had trouble shaking it. It is a basic denial of God’s boundless
love.
If I pray and find myself going deeply into
prayer, I might not find my way out. This
is my prayer-as-addiction fear and it is one that troubles me deeply. In part
it is based on pride, that I am capable of some sort of profound prayer. Worse
than this is the fear that prayer might change me. Yes, prayer is supposed to
change us. That’s what it’s for. But am I so attached to my idea of myself that
even a change wrought by God is frightening and to be avoided? It’s this
inability to surrender to God that is probably my greatest block in prayer. And
in life.
So as we venture into the New Year, please pray for me as I
will for you … that God who loves us more than we can imagine will light the
fire of prayer in all our hearts so that we will pray possibly clumsily and
probably infrequently but without fear.