Rod is very kindly letting me put up a post or so for the next couple of days; I'm glad, because I really enjoy getting to do this, and am frankly astonished by how fast these past two weeks have gone.
In his post yesterday about coming home, Rod mentioned some things he'll be focusing on, like balance, and health, and prayer. That last one reminded me of something I've noticed, and that I want to share here.
As a Catholic I have a habit of certain daily prayers, like most Christians. And like most people who pray daily, I've had times and seasons when one form of prayer or another has been the one I've been drawn to. Sometimes the prayer choices we make are dictated by external circumstances; when my girls were very young it was hard to concentrate (or even stay awake) long enough to pray the rosary, but other, shorter prayers or some Scripture reading was something I could do, and do with them much of the time.
Other times it's not so much external circumstances but internal need that makes one manner or mode of praying, one group of prayers or type of devotion, stand out among the rest. If we are joyful, busy, in good health, and so on we may find a relatively quiet, meditative type of prayer appealing and even necessary; but if we are mourning, ill, or hampered from our activities in some way we may need prayers that are spoken aloud, or that we can pray along with others, to ease our sorrow or pain. In the valleys of life, simply placing ourselves in the presence of God may be the best thing we can do, uniting our sorrow or suffering to Him and offering it as our act of prayer.
For the past six years or so, a daily rosary has been a regular part of my prayer life. The rosary is one of those types of prayer that I always come back to, even if I've lost the habit for a few years along the way; it just appeals to me, and while I know there are some times when I'm more focused on its prayerful meditation than others, I still try to say it each day. There are really only three things that ever interfere with my desire to pray a daily rosary, and the first two are somewhat easy to understand: certain kinds of illness that make you sleep a lot for a day or so, and family travel, with its confusing schedules, late hours, and so on.
The third thing is blogging.
More, below:
Every time I've been privileged to take over for Rod for a week or two, I've noticed this happening. With the best of intentions, I'll keep to my daily prayer routines, until one day I realize that I've somehow managed to miss the rosary altogether; and sometimes this happens more than once over the course of my substitute hosting.
This time, I started thinking about why this happens. It's not really the time involved in reading, researching, and writing posts here--granted, those things take time, but not so much more than my ordinary responsibilities that the time alone would account for the decrease in my prayer life. It's certainly not that prayer becomes less important or less of a priority just because I'm writing blog posts, either; truth is, I pray for the people who read and post here on a regular basis, and being "in charge" for a little while only makes that more important. So what is it, then?
The one thing I keep coming back to is that many types of prayer, the rosary among them, require a certain quieting of the mind to be entered into in the proper spirit. This isn't something exclusive to the rosary, or even to Christian prayer; there are forms of prayer in various non-Christian Eastern religions which demand, as much as possibly, an emptying of the mind and a significant decrease in conscious thought as the prerequisite for praying. When we pray, there comes a point at which we have to stop addressing God (especially in that unfortunate and unconscious way so many of us have, and of which I'm guilty, as if He were the head of some great cosmic committee before which we've appeared to lay out our grievances) and start listening to Him.
And blogging, for me anyway, puts my mind in a different and highly verbal state. I catch myself going about my daily chores so absorbed in whether or not that headline I just read about the formal declaration of the swine flu pandemic and the resultant apocalyptic fears people are starting to have for the fall flu season (black swan or red herring? I think, trying it out as a post title) is something I should write about, and what angle to take--that I look around and realized I've finished folding a load of laundry without consciously being aware of a single article of clothing.
So I reach the end of the day, the time when I'm usually ready to unwind mentally and take up my spiritual habits, to clear my extraneous thoughts and enter into prayer. Except I'm not really ready to do that; I'm still thinking and conversing and planning for the next day's posts and even getting a head start on writing some of them--and the mental peace that leads to prayer eludes me until the hour is too late to begin.
The thing is, this isn't something that is specific to blogging at all. Many people who work long hours at mentally demanding jobs struggle to develop a good prayer life. Many find their daily responsibilities pulling them in so many directions that mental quiet, let alone prayer, remains a distant dream. When many people say, "I don't have time to pray," what they often mean isn't that the hours aren't there, but that the peace of soul needed to go beyond a quick whisper to God here and there is frustratingly absent.
Few people outside of a cloistered monastery are guaranteed the externals of peace and tranquility that foster a vital, vibrant prayer life. But I can't help but suspect that it didn't used to be as hard as it often is today for the average lay person to cultivate that spirit of internal peace which is so necessary for prayer. Yet prayer itself is, in a Christian understanding, extremely necessary for the healthy growth of the the life of the spirit. We are, St. Paul tells us, to "pray without ceasing." (1 Thessalonians 5:17)
For me, the effect that blogging has on my prayer life is always temporary, because my blogging at this rather intense level is always temporary. But for many people who find that their way of life or job or responsibilities in this modern world similarly interfere with the ability to find that inner tranquility which so much helps prayer, it's not feasible to suggest that they simply stop living or working or carrying out those responsibilities. The challenge, then, would seem to be, as it so often is, finding and achieving balance between the things in our modern way of life that interfere with inner peace, and the things that help us overcome that effect to recreate that peace in our souls.
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Sorry no one posted on this topic before it fell off the screen, Erin. I just wanted to let you know that I found it very interesting and I certainly LOLed a couple of times--ruefully--at things I could identify with. Yes, the talking, processing, argumentative mind that worries problems like a dog with a bone is not the mind that eases one naturally into prayer and meditation. The catch phrase that probably started with Buddhists is "Don't just do something! Stand there!" But this seems very counter-intuitive at times.
My family wasn't big on rosaries and such things my father considered "folk practices." I went through a phase of saying an abbreviated version of the hours. I acquired the daily rosary habit later in life and said it mostly every day for about ten years. Out of panic and necessity more than devotion! Now I don't say it, because all of the words hit me on raw spots. Not raw spots of uneasy conscience, mind you--raw spots of anger, disillusionment and absolute disagreement. Also, I've just found that in general, the practice of prayer when conceived of as begging an omnipotent being for favors does more to disturb me than calm me. It makes me feel helpless and panicky because it's like turning over all the power to a being who can ignore me anytime, and I'm tired of groveling.
I have a Goddess rosary with different prayers that works a lot better for me. But what really works best is meditation breathing coupled with various kinds of things that I stole from the Buddhists and revised freely. Sending out compassion to everyone, detaching from my wish to control what I can't control, remembering to be grateful. I was doing that on the way home from the trip we just returned from, when we encountered some turbulence. I realized that what was important wasn't any particular outcome for me, specifically. Because we all die. That's just a human thing. It doesn't have anything to do with how good you were or how much you prayed. We all lose our jobs, we all get sick, we all get scared and angry. It is my strong wish to be a resource of calm and kindness for others when they need it. And to do that, I have to have those things within me first. If peace and compassion are only inside me when everything outside me is going well, then my goodwill is dependent on chance, and it's not very reliable. My great ambition is to be very reliable. What is important is not some particular answer for me, but working to have love, compassion and gratitude and to make the world more like that for as long as I am in it. So I practiced breathing and sending out these intentions for all the people on the plane with me and all the travelers in the air and on the earth below:
May you be loved
May you be well cared-for
May you be healthy
May you live with ease.
That helped me quite a lot. ; )
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