Could you not stay awake for one hour?

I love holy hours. In the last year or so they have become my favorite devotion, and I try to make a holy hour as often as I can. Over the last year I have been developing my routine for such holy hours, since I, alas, am a creature of routine. All humans are, to some extent. That is why we have a Liturgy, so that our outward actions may assume a rhythm and regularity. We do not need to be continually reinventing the wheel, so the familiarity of the pattern of liturgy frees us up to apply ourselves to the act of worship. For me, this is never more than “practicing” the act of worship, which is perhaps why I get cranky when people mess with my liturgy. The innovations are distracting, and I am easily enough distracted as it is. The question “what am I being distracted from” is important, but not the topic of this post.

At any rate, my routine goes like this: I usually start with the Divine Office, which I listen to in podcast form on my way to the Church. This is an important part of the holy hour, since it starts getting my mind prepared before I even get there. It takes a long time. My mind is flighty and easily distracted. When I arrive I finish whatever I have left in that “hour” and then I say a rosary. That is about half of the hour, usually. After that I either write in a prayer journal, study the Bible (I am working through Genesis in the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible) or read some spiritual book. The final five minutes I kneel and try to pray.

I express it that way on purpose. Of course I am trying to pray the entire time, but I rather suck at it, to use the vernacular. I rarely fall asleep. I am not much of a sleeper anyway, and I often bring a thermos of tea or coffee to Holy Hour with me, (although never when the Blessed Sacrament is exposed.) It isn’t sleep that gets me. It is distraction. When Jesus asks me, “Could you not stay awake with me for one hour?” He isn’t asking about sleep. He is asking about attention. Truth be told, I am singularly blessed if I can get a solid sixty seconds of attention fully focused on Who I am with. Actually I would say 5 or 10 seconds is a long stretch.

An hour of prayer is a long time for someone incapable of disciplining his thoughts to attend to one thing for a whole minute at a time. My thoughts are almost always a stream of ideas, sensations, opinions, memories, asides, tangents and distractions, never more so than when I pray.

I try not to get too upset about this. After all, I am a spiritual toddler (not mentally, you understand, but spiritually). Toddler’s have short attention spans, and wise parents do not mind that. They do not demand from toddlers attention that toddlers are neurologically incapable of giving. So I expect that, if I cannot pray for a full minute without losing focus, while probably my fault for not having started practicing more seriously at a younger age, is not something that I can fix overnight. My Uncle Chris calls this the law of growth. We cannot grow more quickly than God has allowed us to grow. It will change when God’s grace acting in time develops me further along the path toward union with Him.

So distractions come. My neurons don’t stop firing when I get to the Blessed Sacrament chapel. The electrochemical

activity, which as a result of Original Sin and my own Laziness (what I have failed to do) is never fully under my control, is still not fully under my control. If anything, the effort to cut out extraneous chatter may actually make room for these random neural sparks to gain more momentum than they otherwise would have.

What matters is what I do with them. I used to try to wrestle them back into silence by force of will. Not much to be said about that method except that it didn’t work. Then I would simply try to ignore them while I went back to “thinking about God.” This was not particularly effective either. In the Screwtape Letters, (which I recently listened to on audio as part of International Read a C. S. Lewis Book Week) the demon Screwtape concludes that when a human makes a distraction the subject of his prayer, the devil’s work is endangered, so I have also tried to pray for the grace of focus, but distractions still come.

My present solution when I notice a distraction is to acknowledge it and see what it has to say. This is easy to do when it is my “to-do” list, or some situation with friends and family, or worries about the future. This is an extremely valuable distraction, and I suspect God allows it because it shows me what is on my mind. These are things that I am worrying about, perhaps without knowing it. I need to look at them, even when I feel like they are hampering my attempts at a more “spiritual” prayer of adoration or thanksgiving. I should not be surprised by this. After all, the God I am worshiping has very bluntly commanded me to pray for my daily bread the healing of my sick. He wants me to lay all of these worries out before Him. Thus, prayer becomes a joyful reminder of the fact that I really have no control over my life, and a grateful rejoicing in this fact (for a few seconds at least, until my old synapses start firing along old pathways again.)

More than half the time, however, what distracts me is a day-dream. That is, strictly speaking, a fantasy. I find myself imagining myself somewhere else, doing something else. Very often these fantasies are quite disgustingly self-glorifying and self-centered. This too, is important matter for prayer. The reason I fantasize about elsewhere and other is that I have desires that are, at least in my mind, not being fulfilled. Perhaps this shows that I am not living up to all that God wants of me? Or perhaps it shows that some of my desires, even spiritual desires, have been wrapped around a swollen and inflamed ego that God must humble. These are certainly things that ought to be brought to Him in prayer. Why not pray to be made into the sort of person for whom such vainglory has no attraction? Why not allow myself to be reminded of how illusory such fantasies are, and thank Him for bringing me back to be grounded in Him, the bedrock of all reality?

But more recently I have taken to staring at the tabernacle, simply staring off into space, turning one idea over and over in my mind. I think about the Holy Spirit, who eternally is the Love and Glory passing back and forth between the Father and the Son. This same Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life is present in my soul by virtue of my baptism as long as I do not drive Him away by mortal sin. In my soul He eternally continues that eternal exchange of worship. This is hinted at (I think) In Romans 8:26-27 “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”

So for me, prayer is becoming an attempt to surrender to that exchange, be drawn up into it, absorbed into it. I do not know what the Persons of the Trinity say to one another. I know that they say it, and I choose to be surrendered to that speaking. I believe that I and every created person was made specifically to be a particular mode in which they speak that worship to each other.

I express it rather badly, and I have no idea how to be drawn into it, other than explicitly giving my consent while I am at prayer and attempting to bring the rest of my life under the Obedience when I am not at prayer. I try not to try too hard, because that is how I mess things up. I simply have to trust that God will take care of the details.

As a prayer, horribly primitive, especially when compared with the prayer lives of real Saints (Therese of Lisieux, Faustina, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Mother Teresa, John Paul II, etc.) But there is nothing wrong with being a toddler. Time and grace will fix that, as long as I am willing that they should.