Hello!

Prayer, prayer, prayer. For any of us interested in spirituality and following Jesus we know that the secret is prayer!

Yet many people get very discouraged when you talk to them about prayer!

You see there are so many books and it can be made to sound like something for the elite!

Recently I read a few lines of what a theologian had to say on how discursive prayer (ie: talking to God) is no longer needed once contemplative prayer (sitting in God’s presence) begins.

After a few minutes I had to put it down!

Look at our brains! We don’t need to know how they work to use them! We ‘just do it’!

The same too can be said about prayer! We don’t need to understand too much about what God is doing in our souls! We just need to let him do it!

You see you could write books on how to play soccer and not be able to kick a ball straight and you could write books on prayer and still have no prayer life!

That’s why Our Lady appears to simple people like Saint Bernadette because they obeyed and prayed without trying to over-intellectualise!

As I discussed this with a wise and experienced priest he quoted a line from someone who’d helped him when he was having a bit of a crisis of prayer!

“Pray as you can” he was told!

How wonderful! Some days you may feel to praise God, so praise Him! Other days you may feel spiritually dry and your prayer is to trust!

And yet other days you may feel to read the bible or pray the rosary…

You see prayer is like food and sometimes we feel like eating a lot and other times we are not so hungry and just need something to sustain us!

The secret in my experience is not to force! A day your stomach isn’t so good you eat toast and a day your spirit isn’t so good you can simply say some ‘light prayers’ and maybe enjoy the beauty of creation and talk to God!

Just as your stomach recovers its appetite for food so will your spirit recover its appetite for prayer!

So let’s not over-complicate things and put structures and technicalities around what is supposed to be just simple and natural!

‘Pray as you can’ and God will help you!

Have a nice day!

Mike