Fr. Thomas M. Pastorius
May 31, 2014
Spiritual Ponderings
Going Deeper in Prayer

As we look at our prayer life and how we can make it stronger, I would like to continue to share with you some quotes from Fr. Bartunek’s book: A Guide to Christian Meditation. Quotes from his book will be in bold and my commentary will be in the normal font.

You will always face difficulties in prayer. Just accept it. The saints all experienced it, the Catechism teaches it, and theology confirms it.

We should never give up because we find prayer to be difficult. St. Ignatius in facts challenges us to devote even more time to prayer.

1. First, this friendship is mediated by faith. You can’t just call Jesus on the phone, as you can with your other friends. He is always with you, but your awareness of and access to his presence passes through faith. Faith is a virtue, which means that it can be more or less developed. The less developed it is, the more effort it takes to activate your awareness of God’s presence. Many modern Christians have an underdeveloped faith. They have been unwittingly contaminated by the consumer culture’s veneration for quantifiable evidence (I won’t believe it unless a scientific study proves it) and its elevation of feelings over reason (I don’t feel in love anymore, so why should I stayed married?)—both of which weaken faith.
A scrawny faith often makes Jesus looks fuzzy and seem distant, just as the sun seems weak and irrelevant when you’re wearing dark glasses. Your ability to pray will suffer the consequence.

Pray in good time and in bad. Rubenstein, the great musician, once said, "If I omit practice one day, I notice it; if two days, my friends notice it' if three days, the public notice it." It is the old doctrine, "Practice makes perfect." We must continue believing, continue praying, continue doing His will. Suppose along any line of art, one should cease practicing, we know what the result will be. If we would only use the same quality of common sense in our religion that we use in our everyday life, we should go on to perfection.

2. Your friendship with Christ is unique, not only by its meditation through faith, but also because the two friends are not equals. Christ is not just your friends; he is also your Creator, your Redeemer, and your Lord; he is all-wise and all-loving and he’s trying to lead you along the steep and narrow path of Christian maturity. So, on our part, your relationship with him requires docility. But docility demands self-denial, which rubs your concupiscence the wrong way.

Can you let God be God? Realizing that most of our troubles occur when we start pretending to be God, it is best to simply pray “God come to my assistance!”

Sloth is spiritual laziness, distaste, and sluggishness in cultivating your relationship with God: I can’t pray before I go to work, because I need the extra few minutes of sleep; I can’t go on a retreat since the playoffs start this weekend and I really want to watch them; I know I committed to begin praying the rosary again, but I just don’t feel like it, I have so much else to do…. Anything but spend time attending to the most important thing: your “vital and personal relationship with the living and true God,” i.e. your life of prayer. That’s sloth.

If the devil does not want me to do something that should be all the more reason to do it. God is never outdone in generosity.

The best defense against sloth and distraction is a good offense. Following a sound and simple meditation method like the one outlined above both flushes these temptations out of hiding –since you know clearly what you should be doing during your meditation, you catch yourself more easily as soon as you stop doing that—and also give you a rudder and lighthouse to navigate through their ambushes. But the methods won’t resolve the difficulties all by itself. You still have to steer the rudder and look to the lighthouse.