What Happens When You Can't Pray

What follows is the text of the talk I gave at the St. Vincent Ferrer (Delray Beach, FL) Women's Retreat, Mary's Heart, Martha's Hands, on September 29, 2018.

I had an uncharacteristically hard time putting this talk together. I knew what I wanted to share, but each version just missed the mark. I wrote about fitting prayer time into a busy schedule. I wrote about how to draw young children to prayer. I wrote about the intersection of prayer and work. I wrote about work as prayer.

All of those essays had a lot to say, and all of them were good in their own ways, but none of them seemed right for today.

Sunday, I realized what the problem was.

I’ve talked before about how to pray. I’ve talked before about meditative prayer. I’ve talked before about using Lectio for prayer.

I’ve never talked about what happens when you can’t pray.

We’ve all been there. Maybe the lack of prayer began with a lack of time, or some major distraction. Maybe your prayer time got stale, and you skipped a day. Then two days. And eventually, somewhere along the line, your prayer routine got lost, and you don’t know how to find it again.

And you know what? That’s okay. Let that go, and move on. Don’t worry about what you lost; instead form something new.

So what I want to talk about today is how to get your prayer time back again.

Prayer is our nourishment, just as Eucharist is. Personal prayer time is our one-on-one time with God. And it’s time we need to initiate – because if we never take the time to initiate that one-on-one time, we won’t hear God when He initiates it with us.

If you are out driving in an unfamiliar area, and take a wrong turn, you may get lost. You need something to get you back on track. Sometimes, it’s seeing a landmark you recognize; sometimes, your GPS helps you out; sometimes, you may be driving with a friend with a better sense of direction. You always know that eventually, you’ll find your way back to the right road.

The same thing happens when we lose our prayer lives: we need something to get us back on track.

In the course of my life, I’ve managed to lose my prayer life multiple times. Changes in life have a way of throwing us out of our routines, and, for me, anyway, when my prayer life becomes more routine than it is heartfelt, it’s easy to get pulled out of that prayer routine, and then not resolve that loss.

I can point to a span of about 15 years when my husband and I had a vibrant, heartfelt, shared prayer life. For us, that period started when someone gave my husband a copy of a brand new monthly publication: the Magnificat. The Magnificat could not have come along at a better time for us. Nick was newly retired; I was still working. Nick would have loved me to retire with him, but financially, that was not possible – to say nothing of the fact that my job provided us both with health insurance! We had to make hard choices. In the end, Nick chose to stay at our new home in Pennsylvania full time, while I maintained an apartment in New York City so that I could continue working. I was able to be in Pennsylvania every weekend, and usually one night during the week. Living semi-apart was not an ideal situation, but it worked for us. My job was rewarding, creatively, personally, and financially; his retirement life style of working in the yard and “walking his property” was rewarding for him. (We always knew our age difference would someday put us in separate life stages, and we accepted this as part of our life choices.) But being apart so much was hard on our shared prayer life. How do you pray together when you are 96 miles apart?

Then, the Magnificat. For us, it was an easy solution. Two subscriptions were expensive, but, at that time, affordable for us…and I’ve always held that a problem you can solve simply by spending money that you can afford is not actually a problem.

For the next few years, our prayer time varied only in whether we were physically in the same space or praying together over the phone. (This was in the age of dial up; the inventors of Skype may not have even been born yet.) We worked out a procedure where we alternated reading the prayers of morning and evening prayer, and we used that same procedure – one paragraph for him, then one for me – whether we were praying in the same room or in separate States.

Living semi-apart is not something I would recommend, but it was something that we needed to do at that time, and the Magnificat was an important piece of what kept us close together through the distance.

Time went on. After 9/11, when I was stuck in New York, and couldn’t even get out of the city for days, we weighed our choices again, and ended up making the hard decision of cutting my work hours, moving out to Pennsylvania, and doing the twice a day, 96 mile commute. Physically and emotionally, that was harder than living semi-apart. But every weekday, before Nick drove me to the bus station, we sat together and prayed morning prayer from the Magnificat; every evening when he drove me back from the bus station, we sat together and prayed evening prayer from the Magnificat. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can easily see him, sitting across from me at the kitchen table, dishes cleared away, Magnificats in hand.

And because we were praying the same prayers every day, because we were reading the same meditations, because we were worshipping together, we were growing in love and faith together. The more we prayed together, the deeper our bond became.

Time went on. Life goes on, and it takes turns that take us by surprise.

Ultimately, I stopped commuting, and found a job in Pennsylvania. The drop in salary made it a bit difficult to keep up the two subscriptions, but we both knew how much the Magnificat enriched our prayer life, so we made other cuts. We had the luxury of more time together, and our Magnificats went on all our journeys with us.

I can’t figure out when Nick first started suffering from the disease that ended up causing his death. I know he had the Pacemaker placed in 2011, so it was after that. But he suffered from colitis, then acute colitis, and finally the acute ulcerative colitis that he lost the fight to. Somewhere in there, somewhere in the last six months or so before he died, our lives changed, a piece at a time. We took our last vacation together in October, 2015, to our happy place, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I know our Magnificats made that journey with us; I know we kept up our usual hotel room / vacation prayer routine. Then in November, when he spent a few days in the hospital…I think that might be when the first big crack in our prayer time happened. And I know that the three weeks he spent in the hospital in December was when our together prayer time crumbled. I lived in that hospital room those three weeks, praying the prayers of the Magnificat myself, sitting in the dark, watching him sleep.

When he came home, in time for Christmas, I thought we would get back to normal. I would soon realize that normal no longer existed. It was just a month later when we made the choice to move from the impossible task of making him well to the task of making his death comfortable. So we began in-home hospice. The next 25 days were the most intense time of my life. I couldn’t even manage to pick up the Magnificat. My only prayer, ever, was to get through each day; to not show my rage; to not try to force Nick to stay alive in suffering pain, just so that I wouldn’t have to face the pain I was feeling, and that I knew would get much, much worse.

The last week of his life, the only prayer I had was “please, Lord, help us both get through this.”

And then, waking up at 3:30 in the morning on Valentine’s Day, looking at him in his bed, and seeing his peaceful face and relaxed pose, knowing he was gone.

It was a good thing that we had already planned the funeral, because I was not in any shape to make any decisions.

And then, a week later, when the funeral was over, when everyone had gone home, I was alone. I could not bear to even open the Magnificat. I prayed, at least I tried to, but my prayer was little more than a continuation of my prayer while Nick was dying: “please, Lord, help me get through this.”

It took me a very long time to be able to open the Magnificat again, and even now, I still can’t go back to that same prayer routine. How can I read alone what we read together? Every time I try it, prayer time becomes crying time. I did, finally, put a new prayer time back together, but it was choppy, and not as deep as it had been. It took me over two years to actually have a new prayer routine.

Having grown up with Dominican nuns teaching in grammar school, and then the nuns of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in high school, I was always drawn to the rosary. Going to daily Mass here at St. Vincent Ferrer, and hearing Jean leading the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, I was intrigued by this new way of using rosary beads. And in taking out my rosary beads, I was drawn back to the rosary. And, in God’s way of giving us what we need when we need it, I was then lead to the Legion of Mary. The daily prayer of the Legion, the fellowship of the Legion, the joy of communal recitation of the rosary: all these helped me to rediscover and renew my personal prayer time.

My personal prayer time will never be the same as it was before, when it was prayer both personal and an expression of marital love. Then again, I’m not the same person I was then.

The weekend before Nick died, I wrote in my journal that I was in a state of between: not still a wife, not yet a widow. It still feels strange to check off the box that says “widow”. Yet I can, without hesitation, check off the box that says “Catholic”, and know that, even though the way I pray has changed, I still can check off the box that says “pray-er”.

As I mentioned, in grammar school, we had the Dominican Sisters of Amityville. Back then, nuns still wore the full habits, and the Dominicans wore a huge, fifteen decade rosary, which hung on the belt, and reached down almost to the floor. The rosary was a huge part of my religious upbringing. Being an impressionable child (to put it kindly), I developed not just a love of the rosary, but an overprotectiveness of it. I was even quite upset that Pope Benedict added a fourth group of mysteries: how dare anyone mess with what St. Dominic had wrought! However, as my spiritual life matured, I was able to recognize the rosary for all its virtues. The rosary itself, with its familiar prayers, allows us to meditate on salvation history. It’s not that we mindlessly repeat the Hail Mary, it’s that we can pray the Hail Mary while thinking about the Annunciation, or the Wedding at Cana, or the Crowning with Thorns, or the Resurrection. The mysteries of the rosary walk us through the life of Christ.

And when we utilize our rosary beads for other prayer, that same repetition can help us to concentrate on our prayers, our thoughts, our true inner conversation with God. Because that’s what prayer is: conversation with God. And like all good conversations, we need to speak, and we need to listen. If we pray, worried if we are remembering the words of the prayer correctly, making sure we say it exactly correctly: well, are we praying or are we saying an incantation? Those memorized prayers are important, but so are prayers from the heart.

Over the past year, we’ve discussed the type of prayer called “Lectio” on various occasions, particularly Lectio Divina. The Carmelite Constitutions defines Lectio divina as an authentic source of Christian spirituality recommended by their Rule. Carmelites practice it every day, so that they may develop a deep and genuine love for it, and so that they may grow in the surpassing knowledge of Christ.

Lectio Divina has four stages: READING the Word of God, slowly and reflectively so that it sinks in. The second stage is REFLECTION where we think about the text we have chosen and ruminate upon it so that we take from it what God wants to give us. The third stage is RESPONSE, where we set aside our own thinking and open our hearts to speak to God, inspired by our reflection. The final stage is REST, where we simply rest in the Word.

Lectio Divina is a wonderful tool for reading the bible. Lectio is also a wonderful tool to inspire your prayer life. Take, for example, the Our Father. What if, instead of just saying the words we memorized so long ago, we said them totally mindfully, stopping to reflect on each phrase or even single word. Just take the two words “Our Father.” Think of what it means to call God not just father, but OUR father. If He is OUR father, then who are our brothers and sisters?

You can use Lectio on any reading that leads you to God.

One of the items in your gift bags is a poem called A Kitchen Prayer. This poem hung in our kitchen when I was growing up. When I was about 8 years old, I memorized it, for no reason other than I liked it. It remains, some 60 years later, the only poem I ever memorized just because I wanted to. Looking back now, I realize that I had unknowingly applied a type of Lectio to my reading, and re-reading, that poem. I’d like to take you through part of it now, as an example of how to apply Lectio to any reading.

Lord of all the pots and pans and things,

That seems odd. How can the Lord be the Lord of things that can’t think. Maybe it’s just a pretty poetic line. But it must mean something. After all, God made the materials that make up those pots and pans and things. And God made the people who designed the pots and pans, and the people who make them, and the people who sell them, and the people who use them. God isn’t just the God of me, He isn’t just the God of my family, He’s the God of everyone and everything.

Since I’ve not time to be a saint by doing lovely things or watching late with Thee, Or dreaming in the dawn light or storming Heaven’s gates

That’s what the saints do, isn’t it? They sit around praying all the time, and staring out the window to the heavens, and praying. That must be what storming Heaven’s gates means, praying all the time. Because that’s what saints do, right? They just pray all the time. I mean, what saint ever did anything great, especially a girl saint. Oh, wait…what about Joan of Arc? Or Saint Theresa? They prayed, but they did things, important things, too. Maybe there is more to being a saint than just praying.

Make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates.

But that’s not something big or important. How does doing that make me a saint? Maybe things don’t have to be big to be important. Maybe taking care of the family, and helping one another grow in love, is what’s really important. It’s about doing God’s will, not mine, and maybe right now my job is to be the family caretaker.

Although I must have Martha’s hands, I have a Mary mind

Maybe Martha had a Mary mind, too, deep down. She was all caught up in the necessity of having to get the meals and wash up the plates, when all she really wanted to do was sit by Jesus and listen to Him. I mean, who can blame her? If Jesus came to visit me in person, wouldn’t I want to be sure He was comfortable, and that He was offered food and drink? But I sure wouldn’t want to be stuck in the kitchen cooking when I could be listening to Him. Maybe that’s the real trick, to manage to balance the work we have to do on earth with the time we want to spend with heaven. We may be in exile, but we can still talk to God.

Well, you get the idea. In our busy lives, we don’t always have as much time as we would like to pray. And even our best intentions to set aside uninterruptable prayer time get stymied by necessities like crying children, parents who need our help, compulsory overtime, open bridges, passing trains, and a slew of other things that make up life and are just not in our control.

Sometimes, the only prayer I have time for is that one line from the poem: “Accept this meditation Lord, I haven’t time for more.”

Time is a precious commodity. Think of how fast it goes. We all know the feeling: our children are babies one day, starting kindergarten the next, and a few weeks later, they’re off to college. And we try to hold on to time, to spend time with them, to not miss the milestones.

Time is a precious commodity. We know how hard it is to make time to see our friends, to make time to get a haircut, to make time for a manicure. Somehow, at the end of the day, or the end of the week, we’ve managed to fit in everything. Maybe the haircut got pushed back a day, but it got done. Somehow, in the midst of everything, everything we really want to do does get done. We may not check off everything on our list, but the stuff that’s important to us is stuff we make time for.

Time. Time is a precious commodity. We look forward to spending eternity in heaven. But to gain heaven, we need to spend our time here wisely. That includes making time for prayer. I sure don’t want to show up at the gates of heaven, and have St. Peter ask “And you are…???” I’d rather he greet me like an old friend.

My goal, always, is to pray. Even if it’s just a short prayer, one that lasts the length of time I am at a stop sign or a red light. Think of how wonderful it is when you talk to your mother and share your day, or when your child stops to tell you all about their day. God wants to have those conversations with us, His children, as much as we want to have them with our own families.

So, in conclusion, pray. Pray always. All prayer is praise to God. All prayer is conversation with God. Who better to talk to about our cares and woes?