The Prayer is Life podcast by Majellan Media with Redemptorist priest Fr David Hore CSsR 

In this podcast we look at the struggles people have with praying.

Some people can use every excuse in the book as to why they don’t pray regularly or even at all. Being too busy is one excuse, but that is pretty poor reasoning.

I think as children, most of us were probably encouraged to set aside time for prayer. Encouraged to set aside time for prayer, and many of the spiritual writers suggest that we should spend half an hour or even an hour a day in prayer. Now, for some people that might be right or a good time, but for most people I think it’s impossible. And the main things to remember are these firstly, we need to spend some time in prayer each day, and most of us can probably manage ten minutes or at least five, or even two or three. I always encourage people in their prayer to look at bite size. Don’t try to start too big. You can always increase your time for prayer if that’s how you feel and how you’re drawn. But bite size. Begin with something that’s really manageable, because sometimes we can be so busy with life that it just gets taken up with all sorts of other pressing matters. So try to find something that’s manageable. Secondly, we ought to aim for prayer throughout the day also, not just at the beginning or the end of the day.

St Francis de Sales suggests that in our daily life, try to imagine ourselves as a child walking along a country lane, holding his or her father’s hand and, at the same time, using the other hand to pick blackberries.

Now let me explain in other words with one hand we live in our world and we get the best for it and from it. With the other hand, we keep in touch with our Heavenly Father, and I think that’s important through the rhythm of the day, always just to have that awareness of God’s presence, that we are living in the world. We are busy and yet somehow to keep our hand in God’s hand. And then, thirdly, it’s been said that the secret of getting ahead in life is getting started. So, with prayer, get started, make a start. Prayer is a discipline, it’s a way of life, and so it needs to be nurtured and encouraged and developed. And so it’s like anything that we try to do in life, it just doesn’t happen. We need to be able to set aside that time, find a place, find a way, find a method of prayer and just open ourselves to the beauty of experiencing God every moment of every day.

A misguided notion about praying -it’s not always meant to be exciting.

I think in my interactions with some people, when they’re talking about their struggles about prayer, so many of them have a kind of a naive fantasy about what constitutes prayer, and what often lies at the centre of this is a misguided notion, in that understanding prayer is always meant to be interesting or warm or filled with spiritual insight and giving us a sense that we’re actually praying.

But all relationships have up and down moments. Nothing’s always high and perfect. We have the low moments and we have just the ordinary moments of life. But if we persevere, real connections develop. We begin to know each other through simple presence and encounters. And prayer is the same. If we pray faithfully each day, year in, year out, we can probably expect little excitement, lots of boredom, dry and desolate periods and regular temptations to check the clock, but a bond and an intimacy will be growing under the surface, a real familiarity, a familiarity and a deep bond with God. That means two of us, God and me, can just simply be together, and often maybe no words are needed, but just simply resting in the loving embrace of God and allowing God to love us and to look on us with mercy and compassion.

Some people raise the bar too high in their heads and then feel like failures.

I’ve often seen this when people try to set the bar too high for themselves. For example, if they’re beginning to enter into a routine of prayer, they try to start out with an hour, or they try to start out with you know too many prayers, rather than just take it slowly and bite size. Prayer doesn’t require us to measure up to some ideal standard to be completely without faults and failings, and so there’s often a tendency for people to beat themselves up that they’re not able to fix themselves on their own and all their problems. Able to fix themselves on their own and all their problems.

Willpower is so often powerless in the face of addictions and addictive behaviours which can discourage people and they quit trying to grow. Why bother, I just keep failing, they often say. But God doesn’t ask us to be perfect. It’s that honesty again. Rather, we bring our weaknesses to our prayer, we bring our imperfections, we bring our struggles constantly to God, and that we walk with God as we are and never hide from God. God simply asks us to come home, share our lives with him and let God help us where we are powerless to help ourselves.

And if you think at the moment, we’re often hearing in our churches during Lent that great Lenten hymn of Hosea come back to me with all your heart, don’t let fear keep us apart. Long have I waited for your coming home to me and living deeply our new lives Now. That sums up beautifully the relationship of prayer between God and us. God always calls us to come with all our heart. Don’t let anything keep us apart, and God has longingly waited for our coming home to God so that we can live deeply this wonderful life together.

It’s necessary to move past any shame we may feel for past indiscretions and mistakes. 

Shame is so much a part of our lives and for some people it is really debilitating and destructive, and often we connect it to a particular behaviour or issue in us. We’re ashamed of something, something about us is not quite right. Selfishness, laziness, sexual darkness, our past, our physical appearance, our family, all sorts of things and experiences can bring up this sense of shame within us, of shame within us, and we’re all ashamed, perhaps, of something which we can block, or which can block or inhibit our efforts to reach out to God.

Now, if you have a look in the gospel, Jesus didn’t hit sinners over the head and say get your life in order, then I’ll love you. No, it was the sinner’s encounter with Jesus’ love that brought about a change, a conversion, a new beginning, a road to new life. It was that encounter, meeting the compassion and the love of Jesus, and so it’s by being in prayer before the loving gaze of God and allowing that loving, tender gaze to really penetrate our minds and hearts that we can begin to make changes in our lives and to see and to experience ourselves as being loved lavishly and unconditionally. So, no matter what the struggle might be for any of us, be honest with God. Take it to God in prayer, open yourself completely to God and allow God’s grace and healing and mercy to just flood that area of our life and to bring light and life and new direction, but remembering it’s not God judging or condemning. This is a merciful, loving, compassionate God who wants us to come back and who wants us to live deeply a new life.

Switching off and blocking out daily distractions in our lives is important, so we can pray, and pray with sincerity.

We live in a world of instant and constant communication, mobile phones, email, music and TV packages that contain libraries of music and hundreds of channels, malls and shopping centres that are open 24-7, restaurants and clubs with sounds that never die and lights that never go out. We can be amused, distracted and catered to at any time of the day or night, and a particular downside of all this is that we never switch off. We never then enter into the depths of life. It’s this sense of a culture of immediacy. I want it now, and I want to fill my life with so much that I don’t have to look so much at what’s going on inside, I don’t have to be attentive to my experiences. And so, with all of that happening in a day, we’re attentive to so many things that ultimately, we’re not attentive to anything, particularly what’s happening inside us. Our days are typically so full of work and noise and pressure and deadlines and rush that it’s just so hard to stop, to be still and to be silent, and our culture so often powerfully shields us from facing the deeper issues of life, faith, forgiveness, relationships, morality, justice and mortality.

So prayer invites us to find the mute button and to use it and to give ourselves time for someone and something greater God, someone and something greater than the world can offer. And you see it, I think in so many people now they call it going off the grid. So many people are beginning to rail against this world of noise and activity and superficiality and being entertained all the time. People are looking to getting back to some basic, basic things of life, becoming in tune again with themselves, with creation, with a bigger force than ourselves, the divine. So I think, all of us, for our own sanity, our own health and mental well-being sanity, our own health and mental well-being we need to find the mute button and we need to give ourselves that precious time to look at our lives and to see where God is and to see what God might be calling me to into the future.

We need to sit back mute and think about other things at times, not just about ourselves and about the new technologies around us, but about God and about what God is all about.

We are invited to begin to ponder the bigger questions of life and what we see and hear around us, but just to find that quiet space to really ponder and to think about what’s important for me in my life. And maybe it can help all of us as a world. If we were able to just stop, of us as a world, if we were able to just stop, we might be in a better place to find ways to talk to each other, to forgive each other, to not resort to violence against each other, to build respect and honesty and care and compassion all of those beautiful human qualities that sometimes get lost in life when we’re just being caught up in everything that’s happening.