Objections to prayer 

There are lots of reasons not to pray. Finding excuses not to pray is easy; it's even easier than finding reasons not to go on a diet! Praying is hard, and it takes effort and self-discipline and constancy. It's only natural that our first reaction is to try and worm our way out of it. And of course the Devil is right there, ready to explain to us all the convincing reasons why we can't or shouldn't or won't pray. Let's take a look at a couple of his arguments and see how to answer them. These and quite a number of other objections to prayer are listed in the Catechism, numbers 2726 to 2728. It would be very good to take a look at those later on for further insights.
 

1) "I don't have time to pray" 

The number one reason not to pray is that little sentence we repeat hundreds of times a day, in many different occasions: "I don't have time." There's simply too much to be done. At work there's that new contract coming up, all that overtime. The new computer system which I still haven't figured out. When I finally get home there are all the extracurricular activities I have to bring my kids to. And when the weekend finally arrives there's the lawn to be raked, leaky sink to be fixed, a big stack of unpaid bills on my desk, at least some time with my family. So "I would really love to pray, but there just isn't time!" 

This is a very real problem, and none of us suffers from boredom. But the solution to this problem is really quite simple, though demanding. It is to make my hour or half-hour of daily meditation an inviolable part of my schedule, the first thing that I do each morning, even if that means interrupting some apparently urgent work the night before so that I can get up on time. My daily morning meditation has to be "sacred time," something that I wouldn't even consider omitting. I would certainly never think of leaving the house in the morning without putting on my glasses, and how much more important is it for me as a Christian to be able to see everything that happens during the day with the eyes of faith, a vision that I can gain only from that time alone with God. The Catechism sums everything up in one simple phrase, "We pray as we live, because we live as we pray" (2725). 

Dante starts off his Inferno this way: "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost. / Ah! How hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!" Which of us hasn't had that experience at times in our daily life of walking through a rough and dark woods. Prayer won't make the trees disappear, but it will enable us to see them with faith as the cross, the tree of life. 

Christ assures us in the Gospel, "Not a leaf falls to the ground without your heavenly Father's consent." Fine in Mass on Sunday. Not so easy to remember: traffic jam, late for work. Contract falls through. Kids, something I can't deal with. If we don't renew our vision of faith in prayer each morning, we could describe our chances of remembering Christ's words when the actual moment comes as slim to none.
 

2) "I don't need it. What I need is work" 

The Devil's next argument is a little more insidious: "We don't need to pray. What we need to do is work." Prayer doesn't produce any tangible results, it doesn't pay the mortgage, or get my classes ready, or teach my kids how to read and write. So why bother? 

Here it is useful to read a note from the Catechism: "We must also combat the mentalities of this world that invade us if we are not vigilant. For example, the mentality that what produces and gives results is valuable. Therefore, prayer is useless, because it is unproductive" (CCC 2727). 

We must reject this mentality, which can creep into our unconscious if we are not careful, by remembering that the one goal of our lives in everything we do is to bring ourselves and those we love one step closer to heaven. Here we discover the true utility of prayer: only God can produce genuine supernatural fruits in all of our actions. Only the Holy Spirit can move hearts and change lives. If we hope to pass on to our children that gift which Fr. Maciel has called a gift more precious than life itself, is by praying with them and praying constantly for them. "Unless God builds the house," the psalm tells us, "the workmen toil in vain". 

3) "I tried it, but I was so dry" 

Perhaps the most difficult obstacle to our life of prayer is our own previous failures. We try to pray, and we make a genuine effort, but we fail - either we are inconstant, or else we don't feel we are getting any results, or else we are invaded by a tremendous feeling of spiritual dryness. It seems that God isn't there to listen; the iron gates of Heaven are shut tight, and locked, and nobody is answering the phone. After an initial period of enthusiasm we become discouraged, and we say, "I tried prayer, and I failed. I couldn't do it. Maybe other people are called to be saints, but this just isn't for me." 

This is a difficult obstacle because we know our own weakness, and we've seen our own failings. It's hard to come back and try it again, especially when dryness invades our prayer. But St Therese of Lisieux had a similar experience: she went for months and even years in the most terrible spiritual dryness, yet she did not give up her faith and her life of prayer. In fact, in her autobiography, she describes this as the most fruitful time of her whole spiritual life: 

"During those radiant days of Easter... Jesus allowed pitch-black darkness to sweep over my soul and let the thought of heaven, so sweet to me from my infancy, destroy all my peace and torture me. This trial was not something lasting a few days or weeks. I suffered it for months and I am still waiting for it to end. I wish I could express what I feel, but it is impossible. One must have traveled through the same sunless tunnel to understand how dark it is..."  

And in a famous passage of her autobiography, so startling in its candor that it was not even allowed to be published in the earliest editions of her notes, St Therese goes on to say: 

"May God forgive me! He knows very well that although I had not the consolation of faith, I forced myself to act as if I had. I have made more acts of faith in the last year than in the whole of my life."  

There we have it: a soul that experienced the darkest pangs of dryness and emptiness. Yet in her simplicity and her love for God she never gave up, but even grew in the strength of her faith by means of those dark and trying months. Moved by the example of this tender, simple young saint, how can we hide ourselves in the excuse of spiritual dryness in prayer? This is really an opportunity God is giving us to purify our intentions and, above all, to exercise our confidence in him alone. Fr. Solanus Casey, a Capuchin friar from Detroit, who could well become America's first native-born male saint, has a beautiful reflection on confidence in God. "In my opinion there is hardly anything else that the enemy of our soul [that is, Satan] dreads more than confidence - humble confidence in God. Confidence in God is the very soul of prayer." 

 

Why We Need Prayer 

Now that we have overcome three apparently strong objections to prayer, we still might be tempted to say to ourselves, "OK, so it looks like there are no really good reasons not to pray, but still that doesn't necessarily mean that I should pray. Why should I pray, anyway?" We should pray above all because we need to pray. We need it more than we need anything else. Even more than we need that first cup of coffee in the morning to get us going, or that last glass of cold milk before we go to bed at night. And even more than that consolation of all consolations, that brief moment of blissful freedom on earth, our two-week vacation. 

We need prayer because our life really has only two goals: to become holy so that we can glorify God in everything we do and make it one day to that final goal of heaven. And second, to bring as many people as we can there along with us, starting with those we love most. 

A. Our Need to Become Holy 

So let's take a quick look at the first goal of our life: to become holy. 

Each time we recite the Second Eucharistic Prayer at Mass we begin with the words, "Lord, you are holy indeed, the fountain of all holiness." Unless we come and drink deeply from this fountain each day in prayer, holiness and God's glory will always be an elusive goal, just beyond our grasp, no matter how hard we may think we're trying to reach out for it. 

There are at least 4 good reasons that we need prayer to become holy. 

1) We need prayer because we need love 

The first reason that we need prayer is because we need love. If there is one thing that all ballads, poems, songs, stories, novels, and even tragedies agree upon, it is that no one can ever be happy without love. Objection, we probably don't ever formulate it consciously, but it can be there in the background at times in our attitude toward prayer: I have the love of my wife, the love of my children, and even the love or at least the friendship of a lot of other people besides. I don't need any more love than that. That's enough for my small heart.  

Probably the best response in the title of a book in Spanish, El Amor Más Fuerte. No matter how much I love my wife and family, no one has a stronger claim on my love than Christ, because no one else shed his blood for me on the cross. And we all know that we can never separate Christ's love from the love we receive from our family. Each time I experience love from my wife or children, it is really Christ loving me through them. In his very first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, the Holy Father writes, 

"Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it" (Redemptor Hominis #10). 

Fr Marcial Maciel has a beautiful reflection on this theme:  

"All the philosophies, all the efforts of sociology, all the great discoveries of science have not been able, are not capable of resolving the most fundamental problem of man, which is to be happy: to love and to be loved... Knowledge, science, technology, they all help, they can shed some light, but they will never, ever resolve the problem, the fundamental necessity of man, which is to love and to be loved. Only Jesus Christ, and the Father, teach us the true key to the solution of the problem and the mystery of man: Deus caritas est." 

2) Prayer and the Cross: Joy in Suffering 

If we need prayer above all because we need love, we also need it for a second reason, and that has to do with our one prerogative as Christians, the one right or privilege we can claim as followers of Christ, and that is the cross.  

Each of us experiences the cross a hundred different ways in our daily life, many of them known only to us. Even Christ himself did not have the strength to carry the cross and die upon it without first turning to his Father in that agony of prayer which caused him to sweat blood. Father Maciel says in one of his letters that his human nature trembled like a leaf in the autumn wind before the prospect of the cross. Still, in another place, describing the difficulties he had to go through in founding the Legion, he is able to write, "If there is one thing I have been able to attribute to myself through it all, it is that I have never been able to say no to my God." How can we explain this paradox? Only through the strength that comes from prayer. 

But if Christ asks us to carry his cross, He certainly doesn't ask us to spend the rest of our lives miserable. St. Theresa of Avila has a catchy phrase in Spanish which doesn't translate very well. "Un santo triste es un triste santo." "A saint that is sad is a sorry saint." Saint Paul, writing from prison in Rome and in danger of death, is able to exclaim to the Philippians, "How great is the joy I have in my life in the Lord" (Phil 4:10). Only prayer can enable us to rise to the heights of experiencing joy while nailed to cross, and above all to be able to transmit that joy to others in the midst of our suffering for Christ. If there is anything that the world needs today it is true joy, Christian joy. The very first words of the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, what Christians above all have to offer the world today are Gaudium et Spes, joy and hope.  

3) Our Link with Eternity 

A third reason we need to pray is because it is our link with eternity. Perhaps there is no greater good we can do for often desperate people in today's secularized world than to transmit to them our hope for the joys of eternal life. Fr. Solanus Casey calls "Hope - the very soul of happiness - [on] this side of heaven." 

Everything changes under the light of eternity. With the hope of heaven, our problems and difficulties become lighter and easier to bear. The Curé of Ars once remarked, "Prayer is a foretaste of heaven, an overflowing of heaven...In a prayer well made, troubles vanish like snow under the rays of the sun." 

Each time we participate in Mass we also receive a little foretaste of the joys of heaven. Almost always the opening and closing prayers at Mass conclude with the supplication that the sacrament will bring us to eternal life. The conclusion of each Eucharistic prayer is a reflection of the joys of heaven, with Mary and all the angels and saints. Each time we receive the body and blood of Christ in communion we receive Christ who is risen and glorious, seated at the Father's right hand in heaven. 

So let us ask Christ in prayer that these rays of light will enlighten our hearts and enable us to transmit this most joyful of all hopes to others in our Christian life. 

4) The Purification of our Intentions 

One final reason we need prayer, especially as we go deeper in our life of faith, is because of the need we all experience to purify our intentions. The vice of human respect clings so tightly to us: the desire to be esteemed and appreciated by those around us, fear of what they will say. It goes directly against the first goal of our Christian life to glorify God, because it seeks for ourselves the glory that belongs to him. It also contradicts the second goal, to save souls, since it robs our actions of their apostolic fruitfulness. 

Another quotable snippet from Fr Maciel: "Only by working with a profound purity of intention will you arrive to the day of judgment with something worthy to present before God's holy tribunal. On the contrary, if you only seek yourselves, if you only pursue the praise, the appreciation of those around you, be sure that, besides all of your actions and efforts turning out sterile, at the hour of death you will find yourselves with your hands entirely empty and without merits in God's eyes." 

Alone with Christ in prayer we can both confront and overcome this subtle enemy which seeks to insinuate itself into our intentions. We can experience first-hand that phrase from the Letter to the Hebrews. "The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword?. It probes the thoughts and motives of our heart" (Hb 4:12). 

To Bring Others to Heaven 

Heaven is like a stadium. We have to try to fill that stadium up before we enter. Because if it's empty, chances are the doors will be locked too and we might not be able to get in ourselves. 

If we hope to fill some of those bleachers, and have our family members there in the front row 50-yard-line seats, the only way we can do so is through prayer. Christ sums everything up "Apart from me you can do nothing" (Jn 15:5). "I am the vine, you are the branches, no one can bear fruit apart from the vine." 

Earlier we mentioned that the best test of whether or not we are praying well is if our prayer brings us to do God's will. Another test, just as reliable, is whether our prayer is irrigating within us and causing to sprout up one of our most important virtues as Christians in this 20th Century World: apostolic zeal, the burning desire to transmit Christ. 

Fr. Maciel has an inspiring passage in one of his letters on the virtue of apostolic zeal. "You ultimately have to take into account that apostolic zeal is the result of love and supernatural charity. Supernatural charity is certainly a gift from God. Man, nonetheless, can obtain it and make it grow by making his heart ready in prayer. St. Thomas already said that an apostle should contemplate and give to others what he has contemplated: 'Contemplari et contemplata aliis tradere.' 

"Apostolic zeal is a fruit of love for God. It is not a psychological tension, but rather the tension of a heart full of love for God. Only truly holy souls possess apostolic zeal."  

In metaphysics we pondered over the phrase bonum diffusivum sui. Goodness is expansive of itself. Nothing could be more good than the love of Christ. If that love is really there in our hearts, we can't keep it to ourselves. We feel urged to look for the way to transmit Christ to others. 

So one of the best tests of whether I am growing in my life of prayer, as well as responding to Lumen Gentium's universal call to holiness: How is my apostolic zeal? Am I finding concrete ways to put it into practice? In my daily life am I resolute and audacious for Christ?