No Such Thing As Bad Prayer
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 3:00 PM
In yesterday’s Coffee Talk, “impatient mom” wrote about struggling to get to daily mass with three kids.
She said, “I love daily mass, but it is SO hard to get there with my three kids 3 and under. I have tried prayer and Bible meditation first thing in the morning, but only the Eucharist seems to truly change me and make me more like Christ.”
A little later she added: “I WANT to receive our Lord everyday, but just can’t figure out how to realistically do it. Surely God gives graces to moms who just can’t make daily mass? I want the same level of grace I experience when I receive the Eucharist.”
Several savvy readers responded with the perfect and practical solution: spiritual communion, which strengthens us spiritually until we we can receive the Eucharist again.
That’s a perfect response (but of course: it came from you!), but I wanted to add some food for thought from Fr. Tadeusz Dajczer in his book The Gift of Faith
In his very first chapter, discussing the parable of the talents, he observes that we often define “talents” too narrowly. A talent isn’t just an obvious gift or strength, it’s an opportunity.
Considered thus, absolutely everything is transformed into a blessing.
Christ, in giving you a talent, trusts you and waits for you to take proper advantage of it. If he has given you certain abilities, then he is not indifferent as to what you do with them. And if, however, you did not receive these abilities—this is also a talent. A talent is not only receiving something, but it is also lacking something.
An example:
In the light of faith, the good health you have is a talent, but bad health is also a talent. Jesus in each case asks the question, What are you going to do with this talent? You can equally waste good health, and even more so, you can waste the lack of health…
Good health can be used to do good works and ill health to atone and intercede for others and grow in humility.
In fact, even what we consider “poor” prayer (when we are not shirking, but making time for it and doing our best) is a blessing from God properly considered.
It is a talent, for example, if you are unable to pray; yet you consider this a misfortune. It is important what you do with this inability to pray. Maybe you have buried this talent and you say to yourself: well, I will not pray. But you can gain so much from it. The inability to pray should intensify your hunger for God, and thereby it can become a means contributing to your sanctification.
How good is the good God! When our prayer goes “right,” when it’s filled with light and consolation, when the kids behave at Mass and we experience the profound sense of God’s presence—that is his gift to us because he knows we need the encouragement and enlightenment. But when prayer is difficult: dry, full of distractions from munchkins, or even impossible as in the case of daily mass sometimes—this too is God’s gift. He wants to be loved and chosen, for us to prefer him above all else—and this longing of love is precisely what grows in our souls during “bad” prayer. That longing “impatient mom” described isn’t a failure or inability, it’s one of the highest forms of prayer there is!
How often we mistakenly think—I think the enemy of our souls wants us to think—that our prayer is only as good as our ability to think the right thoughts or feel the right feelings or concentrate the right amount. We forget that God is the author of all prayer, and our prayer is effective not because of our abilities, but because he is at work.
Another of my favorite spiritual authors, Archbishop Martinez, puts it this way in Secrets of the Interior Life
In time of spiritual dryness, souls often think as follows: “I go to prayer, and I do nothing, absolutely nothing.”
When that happens, we’re greatly tempted to give up. We think: prayer will be for when the kids are older, or I guess I’m just not given the gift of prayer. Or worse, we may doubt our own faith or love! (Because wouldn’t I have more enthusiasm if I really loved?)
We forget this truth:
The soul does nothing, but God does a great deal, although the soul may not be aware of his secret and mysterious operations. But when the period of trial passes, we find that we are different. Without our knowing how or when, a profound change was wrought in us: our love is more solid; our virtue has become stronger.
To put it bluntly:
We think, perhaps, that transformation in Jesus is something that we can achieve with God’s help. But no. Simply having God’s help is not sufficient. God alone can accomplish it, and the only help that we can give him is to allow him a free hand, not to impede him.
Funny and true!
“Impatient mom” said something else that struck me as lovely: “I am finally seeing how desperately I need Christ and how drastically I fail everyday when I do it in my own strength.” I’m not her spiritual director, but based solely on what she wrote in that short posting, I think if any of us learn that, coupled with the “talent” of longing for union with God, we’d be on the right track. With prayer we can rest assured that no matter how we feel—no matter how sleep-deprived, tapped out, stressed out, tempted, grumpy, weak or anything else—the door is always opened to those who knock.
Let’s not let anything tempt us to stop knocking at the heart of Christ—for ourselves, for our families, and for each other!
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