Wrestling with Contemplative Prayer
Contemplative prayer. The name makes it sound restful. The description makes it sound easy enough. Settling down in silence, just focusing on God. Repeating a phrase, like “Lord, have mercy” or the name of Jesus, to keep one’s attention on Him. It might sound a bit boring, but it doesn’t sound hard. Certainly it doesn’t sound hard enough to merit an athletic metaphor, right?
Hah.
I don’t find this prayer restful at all. It is like gripping tightly onto a rope when there are little hands tugging at my clothes to pull me away. It is like keeping my focus centered on scoring a touch in fencing, when there are shouting athletes, screaming coaches, and the beeps and buzzes of scoring boxes all around me, and my own adrenaline is kicking in and I am trying not to think of how important it is to score this touch because it will put me into the next round of the tournament..
As an athlete, I know how hard it is to completely relax my muscles. I may think I’m relaxed, but invariably there is some tension, and even a little bit of tightness gets in the way of optimum performance: if I am tense, I am working against myself as I try to do an action. The ideal physical state is of relaxed energy: resting, waiting, relaxed, and ready to go at the right moment. Relaxation, however, is not laziness; it takes intentional effort, and it’s something that has to be learned. In other words, it’s a lot like prayer.
I’ve come to this conclusion after the last few weeks, when I’ve been doing contemplative prayer, a couple times a week. D’you know what? It’s really hard.
It starts with the physical distractions. As soon as I settle into this prayer, I become intensely aware of my physical body – I can feel my pulse in my hands resting on my desk, I can hear my own heart beating. I want to fidget, get myself more comfortable, pull up my chair, push my chair away… do anything but sit still.
That’s the easy part.
As I settle into prayer, my mind starts turning up distractions. Generally I start with my mind full of thoughts all bouncing around; then, in the first couple of minutes, I gradually push them aside and get to a place where I feel I can focus on God.
That’s when it gets tough.
That first space of quiet thought is a temptation to pride and a sense of being in control. “Oh, I can clear my head of distracting thoughts any time I want! In fact, since I’ve had a whole one minute without too many worries, I’m going to call this a successful prayer session and move on to the twenty-seven other things on my to-do list.” Well… no. Stick around and see what happens.
The distractions weren’t gone. They were just muted for a moment. Now they’re back, and the volume turns up.
Some of the distracting thoughts are so banal that they slip under the radar, and I’m hardly aware that I’m thinking about them. Anticipating the cup of coffee I am going to have this afternoon. Mmm, Starbucks. Wondering if have any cans of root beer left in the fridge or do I need to buy more? Remembering that I need to do laundry. Before I know it, I’ve been spending a chunk of my prayer time thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch. Then, if I get upset with myself for that, I am still thinking about the distraction; instead I have to let it go, shoo it off. Again and again.
Some of these are “good thoughts” and they are the hardest to resist. I start planning a project at work, or thinking about a friend who needs prayer. Or I remember that I need to make an important phone call to so-and-so, and I haven’t made a note of it. I should stop praying, just for a moment, and jot down a reminder to myself…. Well, no, I shouldn’t. Important as it seems, I need to let it go.
If my phone is going to ring, inevitably it will be when I’m in the middle of prayer. Even if I don’t actually leap up to answer the phone, I end up thinking about how I’m not answering my phone. (I have learned to turn off my ringer, because I don’t have enough self-control to not answer the phone if it rings.)
The most insidious distraction for me is self-reflection. When I start thinking about the fact that I am in contemplation, rather than doing contemplation. “What a good job I am doing of keeping my thoughts focused on God!” (oops, no, I’m thinking about myself) or “I suck at this, I keep getting distracted” (no, just keep turning those thoughts away, one by one by one by one. When I feel His presence, as soon as I start to think about what I am feeling, it slips away; as soon as I start looking for signs of Him, I get in the way of Him making Himself known to me.
Others are – I don’t know how to say this without sounding weird, so here goes – more clearly “outside” distractions. Sudden bursts of anxiety, or negative thoughts that have the potential to get me feeling guilty and anxious and – you got it – distracted.
Then there’s the deliberate uselessness of it all. It is hard for me to be, in Henri Nouwen’s words, useless before God. I want to be doing something – writing, thinking, reflecting, learning. God has given me a lot of tools to use in His service; it is a constant temptation to start valuing them for their own sake, or to value what I’m doing apart from the One for Whom I’m working. To try to pray in a contemplative way is to “down tools” for a while. I need to spend time with Him that is just time with Him – not time unloading prayer requests, or asking Him to help me sort myself out, or looking for guidance (necessary as those things are). Just time with Him – and with Him, not with my own thoughts.
It feels like a waste of time.
Until it doesn’t.
It’s funny, I have had two entirely different types of experiences even in the brief time that I have been doing contemplative prayer.
The rarer of the two experiences is that, for a brief, timeless moment, I feel His presence. I am with Him, and I am free – free of the need to think through all the stuff in my head, free of the need to compulsively plan and work out what I need to do, free of fear and anxiety. For a moment: I get it. Then I can’t hold on, and I am back in the noise and muddle of my thoughts and fears, but refreshed.
Much more common is that I struggle through fifteen or twenty painfully drawn-out minutes of prayer, wrestling with distractions, constantly swatting away intruding thoughts, hauling my attention back from the stupid places it keeps going, feeling, to be honest, completely unspiritual. At the end of my session I commend myself to God, trusting that He will do whatever is best with what I have given Him, and I move on to whatever else I need to do.
The interesting thing is that, after spending that time in prayer, even if it has been a struggle, even if I feel that I had thirty seconds of “being” in the middle of twenty minutes of wrestling with distracting thoughts, something is different. Somehow I feel that I am in better working order; that I know something more of peace. And it bears out in the rest of my day.
Patience. Patience. If as a fencer it has taken me three years to learn how to relax my shoulder a little bit more, how long will it take me to learn to be still in the presence of the Lord? A lifetime, and then some. But I am sure that this is a case where it’s not all or nothing. It’s like fencing. I practice, stretch, work out, day in and day out. Sometimes I see the results right away, but usually I don’t. I have to trust my coach and my own knowledge of past improvement, and keep on making the effort – even when it is hard and success feels out of reach, and I’m not getting positive feedback every time.
When I started writing this, I wanted to write that I am “trying to” do contemplative prayer; or that I am “experimenting with” it, or “making an attempt” at it.
I am seeing that it doesn’t work that way. To intentionally try is to do. I don’t feel that I am “good at it” or that I am “succeeding” – but I suspect that’s not the point anyway. Contemplative prayer is not about me, it is about Him – being empty before Him so that He can fill me, being useless before Him so that He can shape me to His use. If I make it about “getting it right,” then I am making it about me, and I’m nowhere. To say “I’ll try” is to hold back something, to label it as practice, not the real thing.
If I can feel His presence even for a moment, that is a gift – but whether or not I am consciously aware of Him, I know He is there. My blindness doesn’t alter His reality. I have to keep that consciously in mind.
I may feel that I am no good at contemplative prayer; well, that’s no news flash, I struggle with prayer in general. It is not easy for me; I come back so often to thinking “I’m no good at this, I’m doing this wrong.” I have to remember that no matter how hard it is for me to settle into contemplative prayer, in that struggle – He is there. As a wise friend once told me, “God hears even the most awkward prayers.”
There’s a lot of peace in that.
Related posts:
Dr Holly Ordway came to Christ through reason, in the pursuit of truth. "In your hearts honor Christ as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 15).
She writes about her journey from atheism to orthodox Christian faith in her book "Not God's Type: A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith" (Moody Publishers).
