{"id":6919,"date":"2020-11-30T18:36:47","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T08:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/?p=6919"},"modified":"2020-12-01T16:42:46","modified_gmt":"2020-12-01T06:42:46","slug":"discontentment-with-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/discontentment-with-prayer\/","title":{"rendered":"Discontentment with Prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div>\n<p>Discontentment\nwith Prayer<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By\nFr Antonios Kaldas<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Originally\nseen on Fr Antonios Kaldas blogsite, 27 June 2012<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>It\nstrikes me that many people in the Coptic tradition spend a lot of their lives\nbeing discontented with their prayer life. \u201cI don\u2019t pray enough\u201d; \u201cI don\u2019t\nfocus\u201d; \u201cI don\u2019t feel much\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now\nthere\u2019s nothing wrong with desiring a deeper, more genuine dialogue with God.\nWhat is more important to our being than this? But it is also true that human\nnature is to shy away from things with which we are discontented. They make us\nfeel bad, and so we avoid them if we can. Hence the struggle that many face to\npray. It is not that they do not wish to be with God \u2013 it is that in their\nminds, prayer has become solidly attached to an uncomfortable feeling of\nfailure or guilt or vague restlessness, a tone that makes them avoid prayer\nwhenever possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This\nhas to be one of the cleverer tricks of the devil to keep those who sincerely\ndesire the presence of God away from experiencing it. Imagine the opposite.\nImagine if prayer were instead attached to feelings of joy, peace and love. Who\nin their right minds would avoid&nbsp;<em>that<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The\nquestion then becomes how one is to rescue prayer from the muddy negative\nattitudes that so easily encrust it and hide its true beauty. Here are some\nmusings from a fellow struggler\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Don\u2019t think of prayer as a duty.\nDuties are things we just have to do, whether we like it or not. Prayer just\nshouldn\u2019t be like that in a relationship of love. Imagine how a wife would feel\nif her husband felt that spending time with her was a duty.<\/li><li>Don\u2019t watch the clock. Don\u2019t count\nthe words.&nbsp; Let it be a natural thing. Here I am, and here is God. Let us\nmeet. He is in me and surrounds me. God is here. Who needs a clock?<\/li><li>Enjoy your prayers. Sweeten them with\nyour favourite tunes. Pray with a smile on your face. Rejoice that you have the\nopportunity to connect with your Creator.<\/li><li>Focus on God, not yourself. Who do\nyou think about when praying? It is so easy to be focused on oneself \u2013 God help\nME. God forgive ME. God change ME. These are not bad prayers, it\u2019s just that if\nthese are the only prayers you pray, that\u2019s a pretty one-sided relationship.\nTry to forget the ME sometimes and just focus on HIM. It is in losing ourselves\nthat we find our true selves.&nbsp; The best way to see yourself is reflected\nin the loving eyes of Christ.<\/li><li>Don\u2019t get bogged down in repeating\nthe same things mechanically every day. Sure, there are some things we need to\nshare with God every day, like expressing our gratitude and confessing our\nsins. But every day brings new things to be grateful for, and new sins to\nconfess. Your own inner life is constantly changing every day, so share that\ndynamic life with Him who never changes. He is your rock, your immovable point\nof reference in a confusingly liquid world.<\/li><li>Study the formal prayers. Many people\ngo through their whole life having only ever encountered the formal prayers\nlike the tasbeha, the Agbia and the liturgy in \u201cquick mode\u201d. &nbsp;In other\nwords, they only ever use their words in praying them at normal speed. But you\ncan\u2019t really get into the deep meaning of those prayers at this speed. You\nremember your English lessons at school (with at least some fondness, I hope)?\nReading a poem the first time often only gave you a vague sense of what it was\nabout, but it was only when you read through again more carefully, stopped to\nthink about individual phrases and how the whole thing hangs together,\ndiscussed it with teacher and classmates, and wrote your interpretations of it\nthat your really discovered its profound meaning and beauty. Formal prayers are\nno different. If you want to enjoy them, then study them, think about them,\ndiscuss them and write about them. Then every time you pray them at normal\nspeed, they will mean so much more.<\/li><li>Every thought is a prayer. Remember\nthat God is He \u201cin whom we live and move and have our being\u201d. Every thought you\nthink is visible before God, and therefore every thought you think is a kind of\nprayer, if only you realised it. Realise it! The person who constantly shares\ntheir inner life with God throughout the day finds it so much easier to pray\nwhen they shut off all distractions to focus solely on that dialogue with God.\nIndeed, prayer becomes something you crave, for you find the distractions\nannoying and rejoice when you can escape them and be focused. (Of course, that\nmay just be my male brain talking \u2013 women are so much better at multi-tasking!)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I\ngenuinely believe that there is nothing sweeter in this life than those times\nwhen we connect with the Infinite, Eternal, All-loving I AM; the sole and\nperfect Truth from which all reality flows. Or on another level, we connect\nwith the loving Father who cares for us with such minute care that He even\ncounts the hairs of our heads. How could we ever allow negative feelings attach\nto such a beautiful experience?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Original blog available at- http:\/\/www.frantonios.org.au\/2012\/06\/27\/discontentment-with-prayer\/#more-648<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Discontentment with Prayer By Fr Antonios Kaldas Originally seen on Fr Antonios Kaldas blogsite, 27 June 2012 It strikes me that many people in the Coptic tradition spend a lot of their lives being discontented with their prayer life. \u201cI don\u2019t pray enough\u201d; \u201cI don\u2019t focus\u201d; \u201cI don\u2019t feel much\u201d. Now there\u2019s nothing wrong with &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/discontentment-with-prayer\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Discontentment with Prayer&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6923,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-6919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-prayer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6919"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6920,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6919\/revisions\/6920"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stmark.com.au\/Blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}