Boredom in Prayer

WHEN WE TRY to pray, sometimes all seems well; but more often, all we feel is dryness, emptiness, boredom. Sometimes we have a deep sense of God’s reality and at other times we can’t even imagine that God exists. Sometimes we have deep feelings about God’s goodness and love yet often we feel only distraction. Prayer has a huge ebb and flow.
We may be reassured by the experience of Theresa of Avila who, after a season of deep fervor in prayer, experienced twenty years of boredom and dryness. The journals of Mother Theresa show how, like Theresa of Avila, after some initial fervor in prayer, experienced nothing but dryness for the rest of her life.
Prayer is not meant to be always full of fervour, spiritual insight, and the sense that we are actually praying. An equally misguided notion is that the way to sustain feeling and fervor in prayer is through constant novelty and variety or through dogged concentration.
Classical writers in spirituality assure us that, while this is often true when we are beginners at prayer and in the early stage of our spiritual lives, it becomes less and less true the deeper we advance in prayer and spirituality.
The mystics tell us that once we are beyond the early stage of prayer, the single greatest obstacle to sustaining a life of prayer is simply boredom and the sense that nothing meaningful is happening. That doesn’t mean we are regressing in prayer: it often means the opposite.
If we do struggle with boredom and the sense that nothing meaningful is
happening, it may be helpful to imagine you have an aged mother who is confined to a nursing home. You’re the dutiful daughter or son, and regularly spend time with her, sharing the events of the day, simply being with her.
Save for a rare occasion, you will not have many deeply emotive or even interesting conversations with her. On the surface your visits will seem mostly routine, dry, and dutiful. Most times you will be talking about trivial, everyday, things and you will be sneaking the occasional glance at the clock to see when your hour with her will be over.
However, if you persevere in these regular visits with her, month after month, year after year, you will grow to know your mother more deeply and she will grow to know you more deeply; because, as the mystics affirm, at a certain deep level of relationship the real connection between us takes place below the surface of our conversations. We begin to know each other through simple presence.
You can recognize this in its opposite: Notice how your mother relates to your siblings who visit her only very occasionally. During those rare visits there will be emotions, and conversations beyond the weather and the trivia of everyday life. But that’s because your mother sees these others so rarely.
Prayer is the same. If we pray only occasionally, we might well experience some deep emotions in our prayer. However, if we pray faithfully every day, year in and year out, we can expect little excitement, lots of boredom, regular temptations to look at the clock during prayer: but also a deep, growing bond with God.
14/10/11
Peter Knott SJ