Category: Beauty

Why Prayer is Boring

I once took a class on prayer. It was very interesting, I’m sure, but I still have no idea how to pray. I’ve even taught classes on prayer. I know there are all kinds of distinctions about mental prayer and vocal prayer and contemplative and mystical and meditative and on and on, but in all my many hours of “praying” (by which I generally mean sitting in a chapel talking to myself about things that have little to do with anything spiritual) I’ve only discovered three kinds: saintly prayer, snotty prayer, and boring prayer.

Saintly Prayer

When I speak of saintly prayer, I don’t mean the prayer the Saints generally speak of.  That’s often bitter and empty (à la Mother Teresa or John of the Cross).  When it’s not, it’s selfless and self-emptying.  It’s entirely about God, not about the one who prays.  I tell you, friends, I am not there yet.

Although I wouldn’t mind a little ecstasy now and again.

I’m talking here about the prayer that feels good.  The kind of prayer where you’ve got something to say and so your holy hour speeds by.  The emotional high of singing praise music or the comfort of finding meaning in Scripture that hits you exactly where you are.  I hope you’ve all experienced this–some peace, some joy, some answer in prayer.  It’s a beautiful thing, a true gift.  And for those of us who have felt God in this emotional way, the experience can strengthen us through times of emptiness.

This kind of prayer is nice.  It might strengthen your faith or give you a passion for sharing the Gospel.  That’s lovely.  But emotional highs are candy–they are not daily bread.  If your prayer were all lovely and happy and fulfilling, you’d soon stop praying out of love of God and start praying out of love of the feeling of prayer.  That’s not virtuous and it’s not love.  If prayer is about growing in love for God, it can’t always be fun.  There has to be struggle and sacrifice and trudging through months of blah if it’s going to mean anything.

Cherish the gift of prayer that touches your heart and stirs your soul.  But don’t seek that in prayer.  God made you for something better than thrills.

Snotty Prayer

I was talking with an 18-year-old boy the other day and he started describing his experience from the previous night.  It seems he was having a miserable time over a girl and he needed to pray it out.  So he walked as far away from his house as he could get, off into the wilds of Kansas corn, and fell to his knees, screaming at God.

“I was sobbing,” he said, “tears pouring out of my eyes, snot running down my face.  It was disgusting.  And one of the most inspiring moments of my life.”

God didn’t answer his question, the desperate “Why?” he was crying into the night, but he came away comforted anyway.  Because that prayer, that desperate, guttural cry to the one who made the universe and holds us in his hand–that prayer reminds us that we’re alive.  When life is good and pleasant, it’s easy to start feeling lost.  This is why people in this country are so rich but so, so poor.  We coast through a life that gives us everything we’ve ever asked for but leaves us empty.  Snotty prayer reminds us with a stab to the heart that we are very much alive.  The pain exhilarates in a way that joy rarely does and we begin to feel again, to strive again, to fight again.  Sometimes rock bottom is exactly where we need to be.

I think that snotty prayer is also a testimony to the depths of our faith.  We doubt God’s existence when we’re unhappy, but we blame him when we’re miserable.  We hope he’s not watching us when we’re trying to get away with something but we insist that he listens when we feel abandoned.  I have my doubts about God–we all do–but never when I’m snotty.  When I’m on my knees in the cornfield (or sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, more often), I know God’s there.  I scream, “Are you listening?  Do you even care?  Why won’t you answer me??”  But in those moments of desperation, it never occurs to me that he might not be there at all.

There’s a depth of faith, still beneath the rolling surface of daily mediocrity, that we doubt until we find ourselves raging against a God who, it seems, we knew was there all along.

This prayer is miserable, but it’s a blessing.  It’s a reminder that we’re alive, a reminder that God is, too.  And so, as much as it hurts, it’s beautiful.  But faith can’t be sustained by this kind of prayer, either.  For one thing, it would be exhausting.  For another, your face would probably start to chap.  But more importantly, prayer is more than emotion, positive or negative.  Faith can be strengthened by this prayer, too, this prayer which in its suffering is somehow more real than even the saintly prayer.  But what feeds our faith is much more mundane.

Boring Prayer

Maybe your daily prayer time is meaningful and directed without being thrilling.  Maybe you find peace in practicing the presence of God and the stillness of your meditation strengthens you to continue.  If so, I commend you (with slight bitterness and more than slight suspicion).  For the rest of us, let’s talk about how boring prayer is.

It really is, isn’t it?  No, not always.  And, in my experience, it becomes less so the more you practice it.  Until it doesn’t.  And you go to the chapel and check your watch every 2 minutes until your holy hour is up.

Maybe I’m just more ADD than most, but my half hour meditation sometimes feels like a herculean task.  I remember going to visit a former student when I was fresh out of the convent.  I was a professional pray-er.  She was 17.  We went to do a holy hour together and mine looked like this:

Dear Jesus, I love you so much.  Um, I really love you.  A lot.  You’re great.  (58 and a half minutes to go)  Um, help me be holy.  I really want to do your will.  Make me like you.  (57 minutes to go)

Imagined continued platitudes and watch-checking for another 27 minutes, then various books and devotions and such to fill my hour.  Meanwhile, Katherine knelt silently for an entire hour.  I was so frustrated–I’m supposed to be good at prayer!  I certainly practice it enough, right?

First of all, Meg, don’t be an idiot and quit comparing yourself to people.  Remember when Peter did that?

Peter turned and saw the disciple following whom Jesus loved, the one who had also reclined upon his chest during the supper and had said, “Master, who is the one who will betray you?” When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about him?”  Jesus said to him, “What if I want him to remain until I come? What concern is it of yours? You follow me.” (Jn 21:20-22)

Jesus basically says, “Peter, shut up and deal with your own issues.”

But I think the real issue is that I naturally look down on prayer that’s difficult.  I think it’s not real prayer unless I feel something.  Why?  The Christian life is difficult.  It’s even dull much of the time.  Why would prayer be any different?

Here’s what I think: a lot of the time, prayer is boring because it’s supposed to be.  If I went to prayer every day because I enjoyed it, it would have nothing to do with love of God.  Yes, sometimes I enjoy prayer.  More often, though, I go because it is good, because he is good, because I want to be good.  St. Thérèse said that when we want to leave prayer 3 minutes early, we should stay 3 minutes longer.  If I took her at her word, I’d probably have to double all my prayer.  But the point remains that the prayer we do not desire has the most merit.

People are always telling me that they don’t pray (or go to Mass or read the Bible or whatever) because they don’t “get anything out of it.”  But that’s exactly when you get the most out of it!  You get discipline and selflessness and the satisfaction of offering yourself to God not because of what he does but because of who he is.

Look at it another way: I hate to run.  I refuse to do it.  ((Seriously, if you chased me with a knife, I wouldn’t run.  If I’m going to die anyway (which I will–I couldn’t outrun someone in a coma), I at least want to die breathing.))

Running is awful because I’m so out of practice.  If I ran every day, I’m sure eventually it would become bearable.  ((That’s what they tell me, anyway.  And the crazies even say that running becomes fun.  That I do not believe.))

Prayer is similar.  We were made to worship but the Fall has us terribly out of shape.  We need to practice. And as we pray each day and gradually increase our time in prayer, we will learn to hunger for it and even to experience God, to “get something out of it,” if you will.  It won’t matter which of the Teresian mansions we’re in or what approach to prayer we’re taking because it will have transcended all that.  But I would hazard a guess that most days it will still be boring.

I do get saintly prayer occasionally and I cherish it.  And I even manage to rejoice in the gross, snotty prayer.  But it’s the boring prayer where I put my money where my mouth is, where I kneel before the crucifix and tell God I love him.

“Prove it,” he says, and keeps his mouth shut.

The God of Failure

I hate failure.  I know, I know, everybody does, but I’m one of those type A folk who would rather be set on fire than get a B on a test.  I still feel the need to justify the C that I got on a Scarlet Letter test in 7th grade even though I hadn’t read the book.*   There’s something about failing that makes me burn with shame.  I lose sleep.  I’m honestly surprised I haven’t given myself an ulcer yet. And the thing is, I started life off pretty well. As long as success was about school and not souls, I did well. I achieved and achieved and achieved and was quite pleased with myself all through my academic career.

And then, apparently, the Lord decided that I was better than that.  And the failure began.

It was little things at first, things that didn’t overshadow the good I felt I was doing.  Students who hated me, friendships cut off; even leaving the convent after I had told everyone I’d be there forever didn’t seem too bad in the face of all the ways I’d succeeded.  Sure, there were failures, but overall I felt I was changing the world and winning souls for Christ.

Lately, though, it hasn’t been that easy.  Failure these days isn’t occasional, it’s daily.  Every day, some kid I’ve poured my life out for tells me my class is a waste of time.  Or makes really bad choices and lies to me about it.  Or listens to every word I say and then throws his life away at some party.  And there’s nothing I can do.

So my motto recently has been Mother Teresa’s: God has not called us to be successful, he has called us to be faithful.

Because the Christian life is not about success.  I suppose I should have figured this out the first time I noticed that the guy everyone was talking about was hanging dead on the wall.  Here I am worshiping a man who was executed naked while almost nobody looked on, and somehow I thought my life was going to look different?

When you follow a crucified Lord, you will be a failure.  You will fail at work because you refuse to compromise integrity.  You will fail in your pursuit of holiness because you are fallen.  And, as I have learned to my chagrin, you will fail in your service to the kingdom because it’s not about you.

This summer, mired in self-pity because I’m a total failure, I found myself listening to yet another homily on the Parable of the Sower (Mt 13:1-23 for anyone following along at home—does anyone else feel as though that reading comes up ten times a year?).  This time, though, Father wasn’t talking about what kind of soil we are.  He focused on God’s prodigality.  God doesn’t choose only fertile ground; he sows his seed everywhere on the off chance that it will take root.  He’s not jealous of his grace but lavishes it on even the most unwelcoming hearts.

God offers his life to every punk kid there is—even to me, self-obsessed as I am.  And when he asked me to take up my cross, he asked me to be crucified along with him.  Sitting in the comfort of my first world home, it seems it would be easy enough to suffer martyrdom (although I’m sure I’d feel differently when faced with the opportunity) or even to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake.  But this pathetic daily failure?  This inability to meet deadlines or love well or change hearts?  That’s a cross.

The central paradox of Christianity, though, is precisely this: it is our greatest defeats that are our greatest victories.  We lose all we have to be filled with the riches of the kingdom.  We mourn and are comforted.  We die to rise again.

Jesus failed—again and again and again.  He lost his disciples because he was too extreme (cannibalism—John 6).  He fell three times under his cross.  He couldn’t even keep those he loved most from falling into grave sin.  He is fully God and fully man, like us in all things but sin.  Like us especially in failure.

But Jesus’ defeat was victory specifically because it was redemptive.  And that’s what he’s called me to as well—a life of failure embraced for the salvation of souls.  He’s asking me to lavish myself on barren soil, to offer myself again and again to be crucified by those whose salvation I desire more than anything else.  And when, in the throes of passionate prayer, I offer my life to him as a sacrifice for souls, he takes it gladly.

(Seriously, though, you have to be careful what you pray for.  I once told God I’d do anything if he’d make my students holy.  I woke up the next morning with my eye swollen shut and then broke my tooth in half.

I’m warning you–if you follow Jesus, he might make you really ugly.

A month later, I prayed the same prayer, and again he took me at my word.  I walked into my apartment to discover green mold growing on everything I own.  Don’t tell God you’re willing to suffer for something if you’re not prepared to scrub cinder blocks for hours on end.)

And his promise is this: “In the world you will have trouble, but take courage; I have conquered the world.”  Not “you will conquer the world,” but “I have conquered the world.  The promise is that I will suffer.  And I will fail.  And as my life draws to a close, I may look back and see nothing gained.  But Christ has conquered the world.  And my life of failure will bear fruit, whether I see it or not.

We are an Easter people living in a Good Friday world.  We fall and we fall and we fall beneath our crosses.  But still we rise because the promise of the empty tomb leads us on.  So let’s ignore success and failure and broken teeth and broken hearts.  Let’s plant in whatever soil we find and forget about looking for fruit.  Let’s embrace our crosses and rejoice in defeat.  Because when we go before God, unemployment and divorce and teenage drama and middle school exams and pimples and even Bush Push 2005 will count for nothing.  We will realize, with Graham Greene’s whiskey priest, “that at the end, there was only one thing that counted: to be a saint.”

Let’s begin.

 

 

 

*But really, what teacher has a kid take a make-up test in a room filled with socializing kids??  I was so distracted I didn’t even finish!

My Hopes for the Graduates of the Class of 2012

I’ve sat through a lot of commencement addresses, from Steve Case warning us about the internet crisis in Africa (you’re right, that’s the crisis we should worry about) to Alan Page extolling the virtues of affirmative action (irrelevance was the least of his issues). The only thing I remember my high school commencement speaker (Congressman Tom Davis) saying was that he remembered his commencement speaker saying he wouldn’t remember anything from that speech. Yes, I see the irony.

I sat through another yesterday, all filled with inspiring words about changing the world and following your heart (no joke—the day after I published that bit about not following your heart). I didn’t love everything she said, but it got me thinking about what I have to say to my kids, my babies who are going off into the world. I haven’t been able to protect them from much, but at least I’ve been around to help patch them up afterwards. Now I can’t do anything and it breaks my heart.

Every year that I’ve taught, I’ve kept the last ten minutes of the year to offer my last pieces of advice. It looks something like this:

As you go from here, I have so many hopes for you.

I hope you know that you are strong, you are beautiful, you are good enough, you are loved.

I hope you live for something. I don’t care what it is, Christ or music or family or whatever, but I hope you don’t just drift through life. I hope you live a life that means something, that when people look at you they see honor and integrity and love.

I hope you fight and struggle and question, that you never stop striving to be great.

I hope you conform to no one but Christ.

I hope you live in the Sacraments, that you remember what Christ sacrificed for you and never skip Mass Sunday. I hope that you never stop repenting, confessing, and striving again to be a saint. I hope you trust in the mercy of a God who loved you enough to die for you and never stay away from him out of fear or shame.

I hope you hunger for God, for Scripture, for the Bread of Life, that you pray every day, even when you don’t feel anything.

I hope you trust his Church but fight to understand all she teaches.

I hope the crosses you carry transform you. I hope you embrace the cross, that you find Christ in suffering. I will not hope that you do not suffer because I know that it is enduring suffering that makes you great, but I hope that when you suffer you cling to God and let him make you whole again.

I hope you find people who love you for who you are but want you to be better. I hope you are accepted and challenged, that the people you love are worth fighting for.

I hope that you’re caught up in a love so great it spills over to those around you.

I hope you dream big and ignore impossible.

I hope the world is a better place because of you.

I hope that when this life draws to a close you discover that all along you were led by a love that calls you deeper, that makes you greater, that brings you home.

And when you find yourself on the edge of eternity looking into the eyes of that love, I hope you throw yourself with abandon into his arms to be loved as you deserve.

I hope I see you there.

Congratulations, Class of 2012. Go out there and set the world ablaze!

Following Your Heart

I stumbled across a brilliant blog post the other day with advice for teenage girls ranging from awkward-but-true (“maybe you should stop offering your own breasts up for the ogling”) to touching (“You are beautiful.  You are valuable.  You are enough.”).  I nodded till my neck hurt and then offered my students presents for reading it.  I gushed about it and raved about it and then I moved on.  Because I am (allegedly) an adult and have learned these lessons.

Today in prayer, though, I was struck by this: “’Follow your heart’ is probably the worst advice ever. “

Amen!  Your heart is stupid!  Don’t look at me like that, you know this.  Remember that guy (girl) with the spiked (long) hair who wore those amazing JNCO wideleg jeans (um…that shirt she looked all cute in)?  Okay, so I was in high school in the 90s.  Forgive me.  But work with me here—that kid’s in jail.  You were so in love and everything would have been so perfect if your parents/friends/less attractive significant other hadn’t gotten in the way.  All you wanted was to follow your heart and be true to yourself but you were stuck following the advice of people who think with their thinking organs and not their blood-pumping organs.  And where did that get you?  Oh, yeah, prom pictures where nobody’s wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Despite the fact that anyone over the age of 12 knows this, though, following your heart is the only virtue left in American cinema.  Josie Geller follows her heart to the pitcher’s mound in Never Been Kissed.  Who cares if she outs an innocent man as a sexual predator along the way?  She’s being true to herself!  Or how about Cher from Clueless following her heart into the passionate embrace of…her stepbrother?  And nobody has a problem with that?

You see, when we’re “true to ourselves” above all else, we’re generally stomping all over someone else.  (Unless you’re so holy that you love others more than yourself.  In that case, may I suggest starting a blog to teach the rest of us?)  Our hearts may want to drown our sorrows, cheat on our taxes, and kick our children to the curb (figuratively, I’m sure).  A well-ordered mind, or conscience, or, dare I say, soul, knows better.

Now, I’m not saying every decision you make should spring directly from an Excel spreadsheet (although that is how I chose my last home).  I’m just saying that your heart isn’t an unfailing compass to happiness.  Because your heart is broken.  Maybe not broken in two, but somehow lost, confused, hurt, stony—broken.   There’s something in you that isn’t as it should be.  This is ultimately a result of the Fall, but more immediately caused by an absent father, a number on the scale, a demanding mother, a best friend who found someone better, a pink slip, a solo Valentine’s Day….  Your heart learns to long for things that will not fill it and runs from the One who will.  You need meat and potatoes but your heart grasps at Snickers instead.  And so following your heart without regard for consequences or kindness or truth, beauty, and goodness just leaves you clinging to the candy while you slowly starve to death.

So when I heard that line, I put a big check mark by it in my head and moved on.  But today, I started to wonder.  Doesn’t God write his plans in our hearts?  Can’t I trust my heart to lead me in his paths?

It struck me that the Christian life is about letting God tear from your heart whatever is not of him, letting him break and remake you.  As I suffer in obedience to him, he conforms my heart to his.  The more I love and seek him, the more my heart leads me in his ways.  The more I pray, the more my life is built on who I am in him, not who I am to others.  When I sit before the tabernacle and ask God to show me his will, I usually just mean that I want him to validate my will.  I grasp at the happiness he has for me without accepting the joy that he is for me.  But when I seek to love and serve and be consumed by him, the hardness of my heart is transformed into flesh—into his flesh for the life of the world.

St Augustine said, “Love God and do what you will.”  Not because the rest doesn’t matter but because your will is aligned with his when your life is about him.  So maybe “follow your heart” isn’t the worst advice ever—if you’re really following God.  Ten years ago, the most powerful desires of my heart were to get married and have babies—two things I no longer believe God’s calling me to.  I don’t think the deep desires of my heart have changed, but I’ve started to recognize what my heart is truly longing for: to be loved as I am, to give myself away, and to nurture others.  Gradually, I’ve learned to see what my heart truly desires and to listen to what God has written there.

I’m not there yet—of course I’m not.  I’m starting to trust, though, that my will is an accurate reflection of God’s will when it comes to the big things.  A friend asked me today how I know that God’s asking me to start this ministry.  I explained that God reveals his will to me in many different ways (more on those soon) but in this situation I felt a deep desire to do something that doesn’t naturally sound appealing.  I like to have plans and safety nets and instead I’m driving away from the people I love, leaving with no job, no home, and no plans to find either—and I’m thrilled!  When my heart rejoices in something that isn’t natural to me, I start to listen for God’s voice in that.

My heart is still divided on pretty much every front and there are many areas where “following my heart” would be as much of a disaster as it was when I was 15.  One day, maybe I’ll be so completely his that my heart is his heart.  Until then, I’ll let prudence balance passion and trust the thoughts of those wiser than I.  Pray for me!

 

Oh, and (because it was stuck in my head the whole time I was writing this) here you go: