Highs and Lows in Prayer

This entry is part four of a five part series:The Easter 2020 Spiritual Stimulus Package

“Most of our lives are spent in Holy Saturday. In other words, most of our days are not filled with the unbearable pain of a Good Friday. Nor are they suffused with the unbelievable joy of an Easter. Some days are indeed times of great pain and some are of great joy, but most are…in between.”

The above quote is taken from a reflection on Holy Saturday by Father Jim Martin that appeared in America Magazine at Easter in 2012. If you think about it, isn’t it so true? This reality presents an interesting quandary for us in the Spiritual Life.

Too often we go to prayer seeking spiritual highs – or even sometimes spiritual lows- when in truth, most prayer is in fact fairly uneventful in this regard.

I remember when I was a kid in High School I went on a “Youth 2000” Retreat. These retreats were large gatherings of teenagers from across the region, and the one I went on took place in a large school. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of a large classroom and gathered for talks, Liturgy, and prayer in a huge gymnasium. We had Eucharistic Adoration all weekend, and I remember the Monstrance sitting on top of a massive pyramid in the center of the dark gym. One night a Deacon read the Gospel story of the woman touching the hem of Jesus’ garment and being healed. He then processed around the gym carrying the Blessed Sacrament with the humeral veil hanging from the base of the monstrance, rather than how it is usually worn around the celebrant’s shoulders. As he passed by we were encouraged to reach out and “touch the hem of Jesus’ garment.” I remember it being a very powerful experience. It was late at night, the gym was in darkness aside from a spotlight that pierced the incense smoke that hung in the air while the Christian Rock Band played in the background. It was incredible.

The chills that went up my spine, and the feeling that I experienced that night can never be replicated. Sometimes when we are blessed to have moments of powerful consolation in prayer we end up chasing it again and again. We go to prayer wanting to have that same heightened experience of feeling so powerfully loved, saved, forgiven, or blessed. But prayer – just like life- unfolds largely in Holy Saturday.

Sometimes perhaps we find ourselves chasing the lows in prayer too. We go to confession and want to feel a true palpable guilt and sorrow for our sins, but for some reason instead of being moved to tears, it instead all feels rigid and functional.

The truth of the matter is most often Jesus comes to us silent and unseen, except to the eyes of faith. He comes to us in our everyday lives, quietly and discretely, and in our rush we move right past him. We go looking for profound moments in prayer but instead we only come up with an experience that is seemingly one sided.

We need to leave aside all expectations when we go to prayer, and let God simply be God. In 1847, after completing the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, Father Jean-Baptiste Muard (the founder of the Society of Saint Edmund) said, “I placed myself in a state of perfect indifference, desiring one thing only, to know the will of God, in order to follow it, and when once known, to abandon myself entirely into His hands, desiring only what He desired.” Father Muard has the right idea. Prayer is not a time to chase spiritual highs and lows, it is a time to simply be in the presence of God…to plug into our relationship with Him, and simply “be.”

The 11th Step of Alcoholics Anonymous says, “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.” What a perfect articulation of this principle! We all go to prayer for so many reasons, asking for so many things, at the end of the day the only thing we need ask for is knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry it out. For the alcoholic in recovery this is a difficult task to achieve because while in active addiction so much time is spent chasing highs and lows. How can we ever learn to live a life that is so largely uneventful? And then how are we supposed to find God in that uneventful day??

Most of us are much like the alcoholic in this regard. We live in a culture that often claims to value an uneventful day, and yet we do everything we can to stay stimulated throughout it. We are conditioned to be entertained, to be engaged, and to change undesirable feelings in pursuit of happiness. We have to step aside from that conditioning when we come before God, because those experiential moments (while they certainly do happen) are not the norm.

We live our lives in Holy Saturday…but the post Easter version.

Jesus is alive and risen, once and for all! He will never die again. He is not a mere spirit or a vision: he lives, risen and glorified… even when we can’t see him. We would be wise to spend our time in prayer listening to the silence, immersing ourselves in his love, and seeking silence and peace in his presence.

The married couple who have been together for 50 years and sit in silence watching TV likely don’t experience any earth shattering feelings while they are sitting there. In fact, for them this time is simply “the norm”, and marked by a silent and unseen feeling of being simply content. Despite the lack of any particularly noticeable feeling, that experience is a testimony to the intimate love that they share every day of their lives.

In our prayer may we all find content joy spending time in the company of the Lord in his love.