Prayer can seem exhausting for me at times, especially if I try to pray toward the end of the day; shouldn’t prayer be life-giving?
Prayer is often associated with something we do at the end of the day before we go to bed. I share the concern that bedtime may not be the best time of day to effectively listen to what God desires to share with me.
Our prayer is a dialogue with God. We seek to deepen a relationship with Him, so it makes sense that the dialogue involves both actively sharing and listening. I wasn’t very good at taking time to listen to God right before I went to bed, since those few moments of quiet usually led me to fall asleep. It can be helpful to make time to spend with God at other points throughout our day, in addition to signing off with God at the end of our day.
As with any dialogue in a relationship, we can learn a lot as we process when we share with others, but we are also nourished by what we hear from others in their sharing with us. This is even more true in our relationship with God.
God is the life-giver, and thus our dialogue with Him should be life-giving; however, if we neglect to listen to Him, we miss out on what He desires for us. Many great saints emphasize the importance of listening to God, specifically to the still, small voice of God speaking within our hearts.
St. Catherine of Siena said: “By humble and faithful prayer, the soul acquires with time and perseverance every virtue.”
The Lord desires for us to receive from Him in our prayer; not just receive a warm-fuzzy feeling in our heart (as great as that is!), but also to receive what it is that He desires to teach us. The virtues shape our thinking, words and actions, and God desires to help us form these virtues through what He shares with us in prayer.
St. Elizabeth of the Trinity said: “It seems to me that I have found my heaven on earth, since heaven is God, and God is in my soul. The day I understood that, everything became clear to me. I would like to whisper this secret to those I love so they too might always cling to God through everything.”
Our prayer is not so much something that we do or produce on our own, but as St. Elizabeth shares, it is something that we enter into.
Our spiritual life and prayer can become exhausting if we feel that all of the pressure or impetus is on us. God desires to love us through our time in prayer with Him, but are our hearts open to receiving this through our spiritual listening? If I’m not feeling nourished in the time that I’m spending with God, I pray that I may always have the humility to realize that of the two parties involved, I may be the one that needs to make some adjustments.
Father Dan Kavanagh is director of the Catholic Deaf Ministry in the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
