“When I spend time with a friend, I want that person’s presence. After a while, a phone call or an e-mail just isn’t good enough—I want a body to hug, a face to gaze upon, the whole person behind the phone voice and the written words. God wants our whole presence, not just our thoughts flung heavenward when we have a second and just our emotional overflow when the day has gone sour. Prayer is the sharing of presence.” Days of Deepening Friendship, p. 173
One reason prayer can seem unnatural is that we don’t go about it naturally at all. We feel that we must assume a certain physical position, or that we must use some words and phrases but not others. It’s all right to feel joy and gratitude, but we try to push the anger and sadness back and out of the way.
Actually, sometimes we’re tempted to pray sort of the way we’d go through a job interview—putting out our best appearance and conversation, and presenting the self that we think will make the best impression.
Or, we are so used to other people judging and shaming us that we bring to God the self that is least likely to get us into trouble.
What do you bring to prayer? What language? What emotion? What facial expressions? What movements of body?
Are you entering a conversation with a tricky deity who is impossible to please?
Or are you entering a conversation with someone who loves you better than the “bestest” friend?
Try this: After you have enjoyed a conversation with a friend, reflect on your part of the conversation. Write down what you said, what tones of voice you used, which physical gestures. Write about how you felt, and how you expressed those feelings.
Then, when you pray, remember that marvelous self that you shared with your friend. Try to bring that self into conversation with the Divine friend, and see what happens.
“Sometimes our resistance toward God and toward our own well-being is not so obvious; it’s hidden within attitudes and personal habits that we form in order to protect ourselves or to help us feel significant. These attitudes and habits distance us from others and from the Divine, and they enable us to keep dealing with life in ways that aren’t working for us” (Days of Deepening Friendship, 148).
The most crucial progress in life is interior. Yes, you need to find your way down the roads of career, family, and community. But equally important is developing the spiritual habit of greeting each day with an open heart. Most of us contain many obstacles to such openness and freedom.
Here are a few questions that might help identify ways in which a person can get in her own way:
How important is it for me to gain others’ approval? Do I rearrange my activities and my conversations in order to please others, regardless of what is true or what I really think or desire?
Do I have any addictions? Food, drugs, alcohol, television, Internet use, work, sex—these are some of the obvious ones. Anything I turn to regularly when I am stressed or in pain may be an addiction or developing into one.
What kind of people do I spend a lot of time with? Do they encourage me to be my best self, or do they pull me in directions that are unhealthy?
Have I developed strategies and habits that help me avoid doing what I should be doing?
Is my constant interior dialogue with myself uplifting and positive, or is it critical, self-loathing, and negative?
Do I find myself in patterns of behavior that are discouraging to me and that I don’t seem to be able to change or break out of?
One good indicator that you’re getting in your own way is what I call primary emotions. Each person has favorite, or habitual, emotions. Some people tend to be angry a lot. It can come out as sarcasm or simple irritation, but for some of us anger is the personal indulgence that holds up our progress. For others, fear colors just about every hour of the day. Often it appears as various minor anxieties, but at the heart of their interior life is fear, and it keeps them stuck.
Some people tend toward ambition or competition, whether or not those modes are truly helpful. Others indulge nostalgia, clinging to the past rather than moving into the present.
Do you get the idea? Try to spend some time each day for a week or two,
asking God to help you identify how you get in your own way.
Blessings on your journey.
