Key to prayer is understanding the practice
Prayer does not come easily for most people.
All too often, distracting thoughts and feelings surface, perhaps an unfinished project at work, lingering frustration over a spat with a loved one, or simply fatigue. So, how to pray when one doesn’t feel like it?
By understanding what prayer is, experts say.
“Prayer is lifting mind and heart to God,” said the Rev. Ronald Rolheiser, a Roman Catholic priest and an expert on prayer who is based in San Antonio.
He says many people wrongly believe they can only pray when they feel worthy, as if God only wants to see people when they’re good.
“Every thought or feeling is a valid entry into prayer,” he said. “What’s important is that we pray what’s inside of us and not what we think God would like to see inside of us.”
Theologian Richard Peace, a professor of spiritual formation at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, says he doesn’t know of anyone who always wants to pray.
“This is why religious communities structure prayer around a regular schedule,” he said, “so you pray even when you do not want to pray, when you are part of a community.”
One prayer community for Romando Matthews, 27, a busy computer network administrator with a baby daughter, is the Reformation House of Prayer in Little Tokyo, a favorite place for a diverse group of young Christians.
The venue for Matthews’ most consistent prayer time, however, is his 1999 red Ford Escort. During his 50-minute morning commute from his Granada Hills home to downtown Los Angeles, he listens to Scripture on his MP3 player and sings praise and worship songs.
“I actually picture the Holy Spirit sitting next to me,” Matthews said.
Matthews likes to offer his prayers by singing. For him, it feels more direct and natural.
For Hyejung Huh, location can be important to prayer. Praying inside her one-bedroom Koreatown apartment is not Huh’s favorite way of connecting with God.
When she prays at home, she tends to give God a litany of complaints and petitions. “Sometimes, when I don’t get an answer to my prayers, I’ll say, ‘Lord, have you forgotten me?’ or ‘Why are your plans for my life always so different from mine?’ ”
She makes it a priority to drive to the edge of Malibu to pray while walking on the beach. “When I see the towering waves and smell the sea breeze, I rejoice and thank God,” said Huh, a registered nurse, who often comes home from work drained.
But when she beholds “the grandeur of God’s creation,” she said, her problems seem so insignificant and the stresses of her life, including being a middle-aged single woman, seem to melt. “I realize God is my friend, my husband, my everything,” she said.
Sometimes USC junior Christina Van feels guilty when she doesn’t feel like praying.
That’s when she gets on her knees and says, “Oh, God, I am sorry. I am not as persistent in prayer as I ought to be.”
But at other times, she can be filled with joy and grateful to God while just walking down the street. “I think the important thing is to persevere in prayer when I don’t feel like it,” she said. The nice thing about God, she said, is that he is always faithful and accessible, even when she is not.
Perseverance is a key, said her pastor, Jonathan Ngai, who, with his wife, Sharon, founded the Transformations Community Church in Rosemead, which caters to people 30 and younger. The couple also started the Reformation House of Prayer in 2005 to provide a place for people to pray for Los Angeles 24 hours a day.
For many who are in pain or anguish or believe they have not received God’s blessing, praying may be the last thing they want to do, Ngai said.
“But if we persevere through the hard times, God is going to come. Prayer is not about us getting something from God. It’s about us loving God ... and spending time with him,” he said.
Evelyn Lo, who with her husband, John, planted Epicentre Church in Pasadena, said “persevering prayer” builds faith and character and helps people understand who God is.
“In this day and age of microwaves, fast food, ‘getting it now’ and ‘have it your way’ culture, we expect God to be the same,” she said.
It’s a misguided view, Lo said. “God is the same yesterday, today and forever,” she said. “He is not in a hurry.”
Peace, the theologian, who has written extensively on prayer and spiritual formation, says he goes through “cycles.”
“At times prayer is easy, natural, and that which I desire,” he said. “At other times -- and these are more frequent -- I have to work at prayer. At other times, I do not even do that.”
Peace says seeing his spiritual director generally results in easier, better prayer.
“Since we all go through these times when prayer is hard, we need to be in situations when we pray with others -- the monastery being the prime example, but small groups are sometimes a modern equivalent and certainly regular worship is a key to regular prayer,” said Peace, who is also an ordained United Church of Christ minister.
Rolheiser, a former president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio who lectures on spirituality all over North America, says a good way to start when one doesn’t feel like praying is to go to a church, a chapel or a favorite place and say, “I am going to stay here until I come to grips with these feelings.
“If you go to pray and you are feeling bored, pray boredom; if you are feeling angry, pray anger; if you are sexually preoccupied, pray that preoccupation,” he said. “You stay until the heart mellows. You process the feelings -- give them to God in much the same way you talk to a friend.”
Too, Rolheiser said, part of praying is to remain silent and to try listening to what God is saying.
Rolheiser believes Christian churches have done an inadequate job of teaching prayer, which, in part, is why some turn to Eastern religions.
Certainly there is interest in prayer, and books and classes on prayer and spirituality are popular.
Still, experts say that encompasses only a small group of the population.
“When you look at the population at large, it’s only an elite circle that buys those books,” Rolheiser said, noting that there are a lot more people watching “American Idol” than reading books on prayer at night.
“We’ve probably done the best in church prayer, but haven’t taught enough how to pray in their private lives,” he said.
In addition to public prayer at a Mass or church service, he says, people need to do private prayer, what he calls affective prayer.
“We need to pray in such a way that sometimes in our prayer we can hear God say, ‘I love you,’ ” he said. Like people who have been married for a long time, it’s important to tell one another, “I love you,” he said. “Saying I told you 30 years ago won’t do.”
In a way, he said, a relationship with God is like a marriage. It takes “concentration and discipline” to make it work.
“There is only one rule for prayer,” he said. “Show up.”
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