It’s not always easy to focus when I’m sitting alone with God. I love these moments of peace, whether in the St. Joseph Adoration Chapel, the Our Lady Help of Christians Basilica, or elsewhere – and I miss them when something unforeseen interrupts me – but even so, I find my mind wandering at times, as I sit in the quiet of a holy place.
For a while, my distractibility caused me more than a little anxiety. Somehow, I thought I should be able to grip prayer without letting go: keep a kind of laser focus on Jesus, who was, after all, right in front of me. Without putting it quite in these terms, I thought that “pray[ing] without ceasing” was something I couldn’t really accomplish until I’d conquered those wayward tendencies that brought my “outside” life into the church in ineffectual eddies with me. I’d jolt guiltily back to myself and dart a look in His direction, apologizing, then casting around for something to say, some way to address Him and wrench myself “back on track.” In other words, I thought praying well was a matter of effort on my part, and even as I acknowledged God’s presence in the abstract, in practice I was denying its living, breathing place in my prayer.
It’s taken years for me to realize that I don’t have to “carry the conversation” in my visits with Jesus, that my human foibles don’t preclude quality time with God, and that there really is no such thing as “outside” life. The monks of Belmont Abbey, in their daily rhythms of ora et labora, prayer and work, treat prayer as conversation, but work and prayer aren’t mutually exclusive to them. Community, companionable life, is more than this, and not all conversation need be vocalized.
I’m still learning how to live and love in His presence, but these days, when I spend time with God in prayer, I try not to grow anxious if I find the concerns of life intruding. And I try not to fill every second of this time with prayer aids or the sound of my own, internal voice. Although there are many beautiful and fruitful forms of prayer – from the rosary to lectio divina, from reading the psalms to giving thanks for His many gifts – I’ve begun to realize that those exist as means to the end of a greater intimacy, a deeper quiet, not as proofs of individual piety. God wants us to share our whole lives with Him, not just segmented moments in the morning or before we go to bed. And sometimes sitting with Him, giving Him the things that distract me, resting there in His presence as we can only with those who really know and love us, allows me to hear His still, small voice a little more clearly in my life.
This weekend, I hope we each have the chance to settle in His presence, not with the taut, nervous itch we sometimes apply to prayer, but with that trust in simply being with the Beloved One, who wants – more than we want it ourselves – to fill our souls with joy. May the Benedictine hallmarks of prayer and stability dissolve the boundary we put up in our lives between being with God and being busy with our daily lives.
