Prayer as Seeking Depth

Prayer: elusive but important

Raise your hand if you struggle with prayer.  Now that all our hands are raised, where do we go from here?  (You can put your hands down.)

Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI, is an author of many spiritual articles and books (his most famous/best selling being The Holy Longing).  This Advent, he is writing a four-part series on prayer.  Below is an excerpt from part 1 called "Prayer as Seeking Depth."

In our more reflective moments we sense the importance of prayer; yet, we struggle to pray. Sustained, deep prayer doesn't come easy for us. Why?

First of all, we struggle to make time for prayer. Prayer doesn't accomplish anything practical for us, it's a waste of time in terms of tending to the pressures and tasks of daily life, and so we hesitate to go there. Coupled with this, we find it hard to trust that prayer actually works and brings about something real in our lives. Beyond that, we struggle to concentrate when we try to pray. Once we do settle in to pray, we soon feel ourselves overwhelmed by daydreams, unfinished conversations, half-forgotten melodies, heartaches, agendas, and the impending tasks that face us as soon as we get up from our place of prayer. Finally, we struggle to pray because we really don't know how to pray. We might be familiar with various forms of prayer, from devotional prayers to different kinds of meditation, but we generally lack the confidence to believe that our own particular way of praying, with all its distractions and missteps, is prayer in the deep sense. 

 Interest piqued?  Read the rest on his website.

Part two can be found here.

image credit: mojoey