How Not to Pray
The number one challenge I had to overcome when I reverted back into the faith was relearning how to pray.
I went back to the way prayer was taught in Sunday School which was merely saying the prescribed words. It wasn't taught to me as conversation between man and God. There was simply no depth to it.
Prayer was superficial at best.
The entire purpose of prayer is conversation and relationship with God.
God is our loving Father who yearns for us, His children. He wants to give us the gift of His love. I have found that there's a way of prayer that stops us from receiving Him as we ought to receive Him.
Here are three approaches that have hindered my prayer with the Lord:
Doing too much when you don't know too much
Prayer is without a doubt, a good thing.
But I think that depending on our state in life and our spiritual state, trying to do too much prayer can actually slow our spiritual growth rather than help us.
Hear me out on this.
I remember when I started praying upon my reversion back to the faith, I had a long laundry list of exactly what I wanted to do during my early morning holy hours.
Pray a rosary,
Read a few chapters of a spiritual book
Find a few prayers in my prayer book to read.
I know for some people this doesn't sound like a lot but for someone just starting back in his faith, this was actually too much for me to know how to handle. This routine was tiring because to my ignorance, I didn't know how to pray properly.
I was a prayer newbie not knowing how to swim—I was spiritually dog-paddling in a swimming pool.
So, what would I have done differently if I were to learn how to pray all over again?
I'd cut my allotted prayer time in half and learn how to pray more intentionally. Instead of treating my prayer as another errand I had to check off the list, I'd learn how to be more vulnerable in my conversations with God. How to meditate on His Word properly. How to rest in silence with Him.
All by taking baby steps and asking Him for the grace to pray better with Him.
Focusing too much on good feelings
I've spent a lot of my prayer life chasing consolations, the “good” feelings the Lord gifts us with from time to time.
The issue is that when we start to treat consolations as the end goal of our prayer, we panic when we don't receive them. Following after, we try to stir up the good feelings ourselves, and to our surprise we fail. We make ourselves anxious instead of feeling whatever feeling we were trying to achieve.
So how exactly do we remedy this dryness in prayer?
We remedy this malady by using it as the main topic of conversation with the Lord.
The reality is that dryness in prayer is meant to purify our love for the Lord. By removing what made prayer sweet to us before, we pray not to please ourselves but solely to please God. Instead, we must humbly approach Him in prayer, saying, “Lord, I give you all the emptiness of my heart and soul so that you may fill it with Your Goodness.”
Open the floodgates and be assured that the Lord wants you to tell Him of your griefs.
Practice this form of poverty in spirit and you’ll inherit the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3)
Being too strict with our routines
I think it's natural to get attached to the means and methods we use to pray.
For example, many of us have a dedicated prayer room; some have a daily devotion to the Holy Rosary; some like to only pray in the morning; some at night.
We like to keep a schedule, and for the most part - keeping a schedule is the way that we keep our routine and time set aside for God in good order.
But what happens when life simply gets hectic, and it seems to us that we don't have time for how we used to pray?
Do we throw a fit because we didn't get our own way?
I think the Lord allows these disruptions in our lives to occur so that we can push out of our comfort zones in prayer.
God is everywhere, and He isn't confined to our routines. In fact, the Lord says that the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21). Perhaps He's calling us to detach ourselves from these routines that restrict the conditions we converse with Him.
Prayer then, becomes more of an act of revealing God who already dwells in our hearts than us trying to find God in outward things.