Teach me to pray

Prayer is, at the same time, the most frustrating and the most promising of the spiritual disciplines. Over the past several months, I have been trying to learn what it means to pray continually, and I have been pressing into contemplative prayer of the heart. So much of the time, it seems like I’m getting nowhere, like I’m banging into a brick wall; and yet, I have had just enough times of breakthrough – moments of transcendence when the things of earth do become strangely dim – that I know that prayer is also worth all the struggle because of the promise of intimacy that it holds.

With this heart and mind, and with these experiences, I read the words of John Cassian (4th-5th century monk) about a man of prayer, “He strives for unstirring calm of mind and for never-ending purity, and he does so to the extent that this is possible for human frailty." This vision of a life of prayer, of what it means to be a man of prayer, looks so different than my daily attempts to commune with God. ”Unstirring calm of mind” is a rare experience at best, and “never-ending purity” would make anyone who knows me very well laugh until they cried.

This is why the second half of his sentence is so important: “…he does so to the extent that this is possible for human frailty.” I don’t know if John was quite ready for the limits of my human frailty, which are pretty extreme, but I take some comfort in his pursuit of such a high ideal coupled with a comfortable recognition that most will find it very difficult to achieve.

The promise that prayer holds, the potential for the life of a disciple of Jesus is indispensable, for, as Cassian says, “so will all these virtues be neither sturdy nor enduring unless they are drawn firmly together by the crown of prayer…and cannot be effected without it...."

I want to be a certain person, to possess certain virtues, to love faithfully and unconditionally; and the constant struggle I find myself in is between either trying to make my own headway into those very difficult waters or choosing to trust God to form them in me as I devote my entire life to the active, continuous prayer Cassian describes, a prayer that is devotional and transformational. It is a difficult struggle because often the first way yields more immediate, tangible results. Unfortunately, they never last. Virtues formed by prayer, on the other hand, are often slow in coming and hard to see at first; but they are the result of a heart truly and deeply changed by the Spirit of God, and they last forever.

The struggle to persevere in prayer is a struggle of vision. It is the struggle to see past one’s own frailty and inability and to firmly fix one’s gaze on the promise of transformation that prayer holds for those who are faithful. Lord, teach me to pray.