St Teresa of Avila is both encouraging and totally realistic about difficulties in prayer. She speaks honestly of her own reluctance to pray at one stage in her life, and says that she would rather have endured many penances than practise prayer. Such humility lends weight to the advice she gives. She observes also that most difficulties in prayer are caused by “praying as if God is not there”.
That’s one of those simple-sounding insights of great profundity. It makes me realise how little I know about prayer, for I recognise the tendency in myself to pray as if God were not there. It is my own experience of prayer which preoccupies me to a disproportionate extent. Humanly speaking, one cannot be indifferent to this experience, but it is it not the object of prayer. When it is my own experience of prayer which predominates, it is equally almost certain that I am applying the force in the wrong direction.
Statements like “I feel dryness, nothing’s happening” are actually best directed to God, and when done so can, in fact, become the grist for my prayer, rather than the commentary on it or the justification for stopping. They are statements about me, but they become the spiritual equivalent of psychological projection, and I imagine they reflect on God: that my prayer is so because he is not actually there.
St Teresa says that the beginner in prayer “must look on himself as one setting out to make a garden for his Lord’s pleasure, on most unfruitful soil which abounds in weeds. His Majesty roots up the weeds and will put in good plants instead. Let us reckon that this is already done when the soul decides to practise prayer and has begun to do so.” In other words, the dryness and weeds shouldn’t worry us. We are the garden, not the gardener, who is skilful and loving and never neglects us.
In fact, an immature and sin-damaged part of me imagines that prayer will be an experience of God being politely admitted to admire a garden of my own making so he can tell me how lovely it is. As long as I retain some mistaken idea that I am the one doing the gardening when I pray, doing God a favour and making everything there more beautiful for him to enjoy, the barren soil and weeds will remain.
“I can’t pray” sounds more honest, but also needs investigating and cannot really be indulged unless, as St Teresa says, one is praying as though God were not there. It might mean that I can’t sit with an experience of prayer which is so fundamentally disappointing to me, in much the same way that so many of us give up some art because we say, “I can’t do it,” when actually I harboured a false idea of the progress I could make with minimal effort, or because my fragile ego can’t cope with the revelation of my unremarkable gifts. The need for humility, for realistic expectations and confidence in what sustained effort will yield, can seem less gratifying than quitting with the excuse that it is beyond me.
Often “I can’t pray” means that there is some truth which I am unable to face. Paradoxically, it is because my deepest soul knows that because God is there, I will have to face some unpleasant truth about myself or what God’s will requires, and I am fearful.
Prayer is the ultimate contact with reality. For this reason alone, it is both necessary and very difficult. It is hampered by sin, which distorts reality, which is why conversion of life and prayer are symbiotically linked. This is often why, when I say that I cannot pray, it is because I cannot let go of some sin or attitude towards sin which resists conversion of life. I want to come into the light of God’s presence, but I also want to keep something unhealthy from its radiance. Then my spiritual muscles go into spasm, locking around the damaged part. This is why prayer is painful and feels like too much effort.
But it is the very point at which the muscles must be forced by sheer willpower to brave the pain and keep gently exercising. “To have courage for whatever comes in life; everything lies in that … Pain is never permanent,” says St Teresa. She is reluctant to let us take refuge in sentimentalism. Given the basic premise of faith, that God is there and that he loves me, another disarmingly simple maxim applies: “All that is needed is the will to love.”
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