Praying poorly

It’s a bit sad for me to say this, but I’m not very good at prayer.  And when I think about it, I have never really been very good at prayer.  As a boy, our house was not one of those prayer-centered places.   We surely went to Mass every Sunday, but I don’t think I prayed much there.  I always sang the songs.  And while St. Augustine tells us that the one who sings, prays twice, I didn’t think like that – I just liked to sing.  They could have been show tunes or Beatles songs for all I cared.

And when there wasn’t any singing, I was often using my St. Joseph missal to try and match up the Latin and English words.  I’d have these “aha” moments when I’d realize the Latin root of some English word.   Boy, was I a nerd!  I might have even been nerdier then than I am now, though my kids would say that's impossible.   Bottom line, I didn’t associate Mass with prayer very much.

We always said a prayer before dinner.  It was the standard “Bless us, O Lord” prayer, though we appended a short prayer after it that always confused my friends whenever they stayed for dinner.  But that prayer became so rote that I’m not sure I even listened to it very much.  It became meaningless prayer, like throwing salt over your shoulder.

We never did the family rosary thing.  The rosary is what you did at a wake.  And I was always amazed as my Irish uncles – who I’m sure rarely graced the inside of a church with their presence – could kneel there for the entire rosary, those Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s reverently rolling from their lips.  We didn’t pray it, but I always had a rosary on my bedstead.  Whenever I complained to my mom that I couldn’t get to sleep – I was usually trying to wheedle some more reading time – she’d tell me to say the rosary.  I generally didn’t get through a decade before I fell asleep.  I was like Peter, James and John in the garden.  Jesus asks them to stay and pray with him and they fall asleep.  I was sleeping with them.

Whenever I did pray as a kid, it seems it was always a begging prayer.  God, give me this.  God make somebody better.  God, keep so-and-so away from me.  It’s not that prayers of petition and intercession are not good prayers, but they were my only prayers.  God was super-Santa Claus and my prayers were simply the good deeds that would earn me the presents I wanted.

As I reached adulthood, I had more than a bit of perfectionist in me.  My motto was that anything worth doing was worth doing well.  As those of you cursed with this affliction know, I’d beat myself up if I didn’t do something well.  The only recourse was to avoid things I didn’t do well.  If I didn’t pray very well, then there were other things that I could do better.  Why waste my time and beat myself up doing something that I didn’t do very well?

In a lot of ways, I haven’t changed all that much.  My mind still can wander off during prayer, I can mechanically recite prayers without even listening to them, and sometimes my busy-ness can bump prayer down to the bottom of my to-do list.

But I have learned at little, and it makes all the difference.  It may be true that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.  But it is also true that if something is really worth doing, it’s even worth doing poorly.  Prayer is one of those things that is really worth doing. 

It is really worth doing because it is simply good in its own right.  We don’t pray to get something out of it – we may, and probably will, be changed by it, but that’s just a bonus.  We don’t pray because God needs it – he needs nothing.  We pray because it is the right thing.  We state our faith in this at every Mass.  The priest asks us to raise our hearts; we say “We have lifted them up to the Lord.”  The priest asks us to give thanks to the Lord our God, and we say, “It is right and just.”  It is right to pray.  When we pray, we act justly.

And as Jesus promises us the Spirit to help us, St. Paul reminds us that even if we “do not pray as we ought” – he’s obviously talking to me there – the Spirit will intercede for us.  (Rom 8:26)  He will perfect my prayer as he will perfect your prayer before God.   

This assures me that no matter if my prayer is as dry as toast, no matter if my prayer seems like mere babbling, no matter how insipid my prayer may be, the Spirit make it a perfect prayer.  Now I know that prayer is not just something I do, it is something I am.

Pray well if you can, pray poorly if you have to, but pray, pray, and pray some more.  The Spirit guarantees that any prayer beats no prayer, every time.  Amen!