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The Prayer of a Tired Pilgrim

All Or Nothing?

At dinner one evening, our Jesuit community got to talking about prayer and its difficulties. Our eldest, who was 82, stayed silent for a while, and finally said: ‘Well, I can’t talk about my prayer. Either I’m praying all the time or I’m not praying at all!’ Many older people may find comfort in that remark: I certainly do. Jesuits do an annual eight-day retreat: I used to diligently divide each day into four or five hour-long prayer sessions, I’d work my way methodically through selected materials, and report daily to my guide on progress achieved. But now that plan doesn’t work too well! I can still allot the prayer periods: the time goes by but where have I been? What progress can I report? On the other hand, when I relax and go for a walk, I find I’m in the same attitude toward God as I was in the formal prayer times. So in our later years, is it all prayer or no prayer? What’s going on?

What’s Prayer About?

Life is a relationship with God: God is the big partner, and I’m the small one. God has a project for us: to make us grow in love. When we’re starting out on this relationship, we spend time getting to know him, his values, his intentions for us. We do this mainly through watching his Son in the Gospel scenes, and so we become somewhat like him. Bit by bit, and not without struggles, we ‘put on the mind and heart of Christ Jesus’ (Phil 2: 4). Time spent in prayer of this sort gives us the occasional sense of achievement, as we find ourselves becoming a bit less selfish, a bit more open to unpleasant people, a bit more concerned about the poor, a bit easier in forgiving those who wrong us, a bit more patient in bearing suffering, and so forth.

At this stage, prayer times have a clarity about them: we want to have the mind and heart of Christ Jesus: we see this goal out ahead and we inch toward it. But gradually there develops a harmony, a closeness between what we are and what God wants us to be. So then things get a bit blurred. It’s one thing to see the sea from a mountain-top, and quite another experience to be swimming in it. There’s less to say about it because it’s too close. If someone shouted to us ‘What’s it like out there?’ what would we say? ‘Well, there are waves all round: they’re blue when the sun shines, grey in cloud, choppy in the wind… That’s about it…’

Too Close to See

Is our journey of prayer a bit like that? We pray because we have a yearning for God. Meeting with God in prayer changes us, so that we become a bit more like God. The change shows, not in our becoming more beautiful on the outside, nor smarter on the inside, but in a mellowing of our hearts and minds. Real prayer makes us grow more loving, and so God is getting his work done during prayer. But while busy in our prayer, God is also busy in our lives, and is labouring in their every detail to make us grow in love, outside our prayer. We are being brought too close to God to be able to see him. Things become indistinct, we don’t quite know where we are, just as when we sail out of sight of land. This loss of the familiar can be frightening, which is why amateur sailors try to keep the coast in view. And this brings us back to the older Jesuit who was really saying: ‘I don’t know where I am: either I’m praying all the time or I’m not praying at all!’ When you have become a loving person, you have become like God, and so the distinctions between you and God get somewhat blurred. You have arrived into God’s domain. Your prayer and life merge into a single yearning for God.

Going with the Flow

You’ll probably say at this point: ‘He can’t be talking about me! ‘ But I am. And I hope I have encouraged you to believe that your prayer, such as you feel it is, is not a waste of God’s time. The question is not: ‘Am I a person of great prayer? ‘ No, you’re probably not, if you think of praying as long periods of undivided concentration on God. Instead, the issue is: ‘Are you trying to b more loving?’ To that question you can hopefully answer at least a tentative and humble ‘Yes!’ If in doubt, ask a friend! The command has been given: ‘Love the Lord with all your heart, and your neighbour as yourself!’ Over a lifetime, through ups and downs, successes and failures, you have tried to obey this command. By now you should have the only illness that is worth desiring – an enlarged heart! You’re more accommodating of people, more tolerant, less critical; you’ve given in to God’s arrangements for your life. You’re less stressed because you’re not obsessed with your own importance. People can let you down or do what you’d prefer they wouldn’t do, but they’re no longer running up against you, because that older self-important you is disappearing. You’re cruising now rather than pushing against the tide: you spend less time in mood wars of resentment, hurt, frustration; you give more time to gratitude. Also you have integrated more or less the sadnesses and regrets of the years, and left their resolution with God. While you’re still a work in progress, you are on your way!

How to Pray Now

Prayer is a loving conversation with God by whom we know we are loved: so says St Teresa. Ignatius echoes this and speaks of prayer as a conversation between two friends, in which we talk about what occurs to us, and notice how God responds. As in an easy phone call, you can chat with God about anything because you believe he is interested in every bit of your life. And since God is also interested in what happens to everyone else, you can talk to him about them, and this will help you to relate lovingly with them. You find yourself growing in love for yourself, for others, and indeed for the whole world, because your Friend loves them. You watch the TV News not as a detached spectator but as one who cares about everyone, both perpetrators and victims. You can breathe a prayer for each of them as the News moves along. A fuzzy sort of prayer grows in you, in which you wish everyone well. You thank God for the good in them and you ask him to undo the bad in them.

A senior citizen recently said to me that her prayer seems often to go like this: ‘God bless everyone, Lord; those I love, and those I don’t: no exceptions. And God bless Yourself: you’ve a hard job with all of us. Look after us all. Amen.’ Further enquiry yielded the following: ‘Well, I’d be wanting God all the time, the way I’d be wanting my husband back, and him dead eight years now. I’ve less and less idea what God looks like, but I’m wanting him more and more.’ Perhaps she speaks for many of us: we try to pray because we want God in a fuzzy but total way. This sort of prayer has been called ‘the prayer of stupidity’ because you can’t say anything coherent about it. But it is enough that we want God: if God showed up we’d be delighted, but since he hasn’t come yet, we wait for him, even if impatiently.

Conversation with the Lord

Arrange a time and place to meet the Lord. Watch him as he arrives: sense how he looks forward to these meetings. His smile assures you that he enjoys your company. Chat with him… ‘Lord, when I was younger I wanted things my own way. Of course they didn’t turn out that way, but now I want to accept my situation as it is. I trust that you know what you’re about. I still don’t know how to pray properly – I never will! - but I’m happy to go with the flow and let you lead me home. As I’m being brought toward the evening of my life, make me praise you and grow more and more in love and gratitude.’

How does he respond?

This Article is reproduced from ‘To Grow in Love: A Spirituality of Ageing' by Brian Grogan SJ. Available now from Ł12.50 from Messenger Publications www.messenger.ie Copyright Messenger Publications.