How To Grow Closer to God This Lent

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In my time as a pastoral counselor (and my lifetime of being Catholic) I’ve heard a lot of mixed feelings and views about Lent, and how to approach our Lenten practices. More often than not, however, I hear of a belief that Lent is a time where we simply give things up or “suffer“ enough that we somehow will heal our relationship with God and grow closer to Him. This stems from the idea that “if I was just holy enough I wouldn’t have the struggles that I do.” But more often than not, this approach leads to a feeling of fear, guilt, or anxiety, because it comes with the notion that we have to earn God’s love or that God has the intention of punishing us.

To reframe our view of Lent and what it’s meant to be, I think it’s important that we first define the difference between “suffering” and “redemptive suffering.” Suffering occurs when we undergo pain, distress, or hardship. That’s it, that’s where it ends. Redemptive suffering, however, occurs when we endure something difficult for the sake of a greater good, it is a suffering that leads to a greater healing, and works for the good of ourselves and others.

God never intends or desires for us to suffer for the sake of suffering. Jesus modeled this by enduring the greatest suffering for us to work for our good and to redeem us. Jesus’ suffering, while great, was redemptive. And he suffered in that great way so that we didn’t have to!

If we keep this perspective in mind, we can see that Lent is not simply about suffering, it’s about growing. Growing in our strengths and virtues, growing in becoming more of who God created us to be, growing in our relationships on earth, and growing in our relationship with God. This can mean giving something up, or it can mean working on something. Having difficult conversations we’ve been putting off; changing the way we talk to ourselves so that it aligns with who God created us to be rather than demeaning ourselves;  learning to set healthy boundaries with others, because allowing people to treat us badly doesn’t work for our good or theirs; and so much more. Lenten practices are about what good we are working towards, not just giving something up for the sake of suffering.

Another important reminder for us, is that when Jesus went through that tremendous redemptive suffering for us, he did not do so alone. He was not isolated and carrying his cross alone. He allowed Simon to help him carry his cross, others were there at the foot of the cross. He was not alone. And He does not want us to be alone in our suffering. He modeled to us many times the importance of asking for help. Asking God for help, asking for help from the people around us, or seeking help when it is not immediately around us. We are not alone, and often, it takes a lot of courage to ask for help. So this in and of itself could be a Lenten practice—growing in the ability to seek support and accept help when needed.

Whatever you choose to focus on this Lent, remember that God desires a relationship with you. He loves you. He does not want you to suffer for the sake of suffering, he wants you to grow closer to Him and He wants you to allow Him into your life so that He can be closer to you. Focus on growth this Lent, and remember that whatever you choose to do is intended to work for the good of yourself and others.

Making Couple Prayer Meaningful: A Simple Guide to Praying Together

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Last time, we explored the power of couple prayer and how praying together can bring you closer not only to God but also to each other. But once you’ve made the decision to pray as a couple, you might find yourself wondering, Now what? How do we actually do this?

Dr. Greg Popcak, founder of the Pastoral Solutions Institute, reassures couples that there is no single “right” way to pray together. In Praying for and with Your Spouse: The Way to Deeper Love, Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak remind us that the goal of prayer isn’t just to check it off a to-do list—it’s to cultivate intimacy.

“All prayer is an act of intimacy,” he explains. “It should draw you closer both to God and the people you’re praying with.”

If you and your spouse are just beginning to pray together, or if you’re looking for ways to make your prayer time richer and more meaningful, the Popcaks offer a simple, structured framework: the PRAISE method.

The PRAISE Method: A Simple Framework for Couple Prayer

To help couples overcome nervousness and ensure a balanced, heartfelt prayer experience, Dr. Popcak suggests using the PRAISE acronym:

1. P – Praise and Thanksgiving

Start your prayer time by expressing gratitude.

“Take a little bit of time to thank God for the things that have happened in your day,” says Dr. Popcak. “Praise God for his love and who he is to you, just like you would with your spouse when you express gratitude for them.”

This can be as simple as thanking God for small blessings—a good conversation, a safe trip, or a moment of peace in a busy day.

2. R – Repentance

While this isn’t a substitute for Confession, it’s a chance to reflect on your actions and attitudes.

“Take a little bit of time to talk about those things that you wish you had done differently that day—things that are obvious to each other,” Dr. Popcak suggests.

Maybe one of you lost patience, spoke too harshly, or was too distracted to truly listen. This step is about seeking God’s grace to love each other better tomorrow.

3. A – Asking for Your Needs

Many of us are naturally good at this part of prayer. But if you hesitate to ask for what you think you need, keep in mind that God wants us to bring our concerns to him.

In this step, share your worries, hopes, and needs—whether they’re about work, health, finances, or relationships. Be honest with God and with each other. Keep an open heart, trusting that whether God meets your needs in the exact way you want, he always wants you to grow and flourish.

4. I – Interceding for Others

Prayer isn’t just about our own lives; it’s also an opportunity to lift up others. This is something we do at every Mass during the Prayer of the Faithful.

“Bringing the people we care about to God is an important way we can serve them and remember them in our relationship with him,” says Dr. Popcak.

Pray for your children, family members, friends, neighbors, people in the world facing hardship—even (and maybe especially) the difficult people in your life. This helps cultivate a heart of generosity and compassion.

5. S – Seeking God’s Will

Some of life’s biggest decisions—changing jobs, moving, parenting challenges—require ongoing discernment.

“Bigger questions don’t have easy, quick answers,” Dr. Popcak acknowledges. “But bringing them to God regularly allows him to fill your heart and mind with his wisdom and clarity.”

In this step, talk openly with one another and with God about important decisions. Ask him to guide your choices and help you discern his will.

6. E – Expressing the Desire to Keep the Conversation Going

Finally, prayer shouldn’t be something you do and then forget about until the next time. “Prayer is a conversation with God that should continue throughout your day,” says Dr. Popcak.

He encourages couples to close their prayer time with a simple statement of commitment: “Lord, thank you for this time together. Help us to hear your voice and love each other well until we meet again in prayer.”

Making Prayer Your Own

One of the best things about the PRAISE method is its flexibility.

“The nice thing about this format is that it’s infinitely adaptable,” Dr. Popcak tells couples. “It can take ten minutes or an hour. You can incorporate formal prayers like the Rosary before or after, or just use this method on its own.”

The key is to make prayer a natural, life-giving part of your relationship. Whether you follow the PRAISE method exactly or simply let it inspire your prayer time, the most important thing is to bring your whole heart into prayer—just as you bring your whole heart into your marriage.

As Dr. Popcak puts it: “If you can do that, that’s all that really matters, because that’s all God and your mate really want—for you to love them with your whole heart, mind, and strength. And that’s what couple prayer is about learning to do.”

If you’d like more guidance on making prayer a meaningful part of your marriage, Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak’s book, Praying for and with Your Spouse: The Way to Deeper Love, is a great place to begin. And if you need more personal help with your marriage, contact one of the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

Going On A Bear Hunt–Understanding The Relationship Between Prayer and Powerful Emotions

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Whether trauma, depression, anxiety, anger, or other strong feelings are causing us problems, turning to God in prayer is always a good idea. After all, God loves us and always wants to help us become more fully alive—more fully ourselves.

But in order to really benefit from prayer, we must “also learn how to pray,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says (#2650). It’s no wonder the Catechism spends more than three hundred paragraphs on the topic of how to pray.

When it comes to mental health, one trap that people sometimes fall into is treating prayer as a way to avoid the strong feelings that come with a crisis, according to Jacob Flores-Popcak, a pastoral counselor with CatholicCounselors.com.

“An unhealthy relationship to prayer says, ‘Help me climb up above this thing,’” Flores-Popcak said in a recent interview. Underlying that impulse is often the assumption that “spiritual things are higher than these base, awful, physical things like feelings.”

But the view that physical things—and by extension, our emotions—are to be shunned or avoided simply isn’t Catholic, Flores-Popcak said. In fact, this attempt to detach from embodied feelings is more in line with Buddhism or, within the Christian tradition, the old dualistic heresy known as Manichaeism.

The Christian tradition says that feelings are given to us by God for a reason, Popcak said: in fact, they are invitations to go deeper.

“There is no point at which any character, any person in scripture just prays a feeling away,” Flores-Popcak explained. On the contrary, the Bible is full of people who openly embraced their feelings. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, for example, and expressed his anxiety openly to his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane.

“Feelings are meant to help us bond with other people and they’re meant to help us get certain needs met,” Flores-Popcak explained. “So to pray away a feeling is to pray away an opportunity for connection, and it’s to pray away a need.”

He continued: “God gives us our needs, and God calls us to relationships. Both of those things are, at their core, godly things. If I’m trying to just get rid of that, it’s gonna end up feeling like I’m just repressing the feeling, and it’s just going to come raging back later.”

It’s like the children’s song, “Going on a Bear Hunt,” Flores-Popcak said, in which the hunters come to an insurmountable mountain that blocks the path forward: “The refrain of that song is, ‘Can’t go around it, can’t go over it—gotta go through it.’ We’ve gotta go into that tunnel, into that bear’s den.”

Similarly, prayer is not meant to help us go “over” or “around” our feelings of anguish, anxiety, or sadness. “Prayer is supposed to help me go deeper into it, to find the truth at the center of it, or even on the other side,” Flores-Popcak said. In the Catholic mystical tradition, every challenge is “an opportunity to go deeper into my knowledge of myself, deeper into my knowledge of Christ, and deeper in relationship with other people.”

What does this look like? Instead of trying to pray away your feelings, try praying with these questions:

  1. “Lord, what do you want me to learn from this feeling?”
  2. “How do you want me to respond to the need at the center of this feeling?”
  3. “How do you want me to grow closer to you and to the people around me as a result of experiencing this feeling?”

Such questions align with the example of spiritual masters such as St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Teresa of Avila, and others, all of whom advise that instead of running away from feelings we’d rather not be experiencing, we ought to plunge deeper into their depths, accompanied by Christ and supported by friends—so that we can emerge stronger and more connected to God, ourselves, and the people around us.

If you need help managing your mental health and want to do so in a way that draws on your Catholic faith, reach out to Jacob Flores-Popcak or any of the other Pastoral Counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

Use the ‘Fortress and Communion’ Prayer to Heal Past Hurts and Protect Your Heart

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Have you ever felt deeply hurt or attacked, only to find yourself struggling to forgive and move forward? Christians are told to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them— but how do you do this when you are hurting?

This dilemma is what prompted Dave McClow, M.Div., LCSW, LMFT, a therapist at the Pastoral Solutions Institute, to develop a process of healing and forgiveness that he calls the “Fortress and Communion” prayer. This approach helps you protect your heart and transfer negative emotions, ultimately leading to genuine healing and forgiveness.

Understanding the Fortress and Communion Prayer

Dave explained the prayer process in a recent interview with CatholicCounselors.com. When we are hurt, he said, our feelings become dysregulated, and we often turn the people who hurt us into enemies. Moreover, emotional hurt often shows up with physical symptoms.

“When emotions get activated, we get a feeling in our body—it could be in our stomach, chest, shoulders, neck, jaw, eyes, head,” he said. “These physical sensations signal that it’s time to address the underlying emotional pain.”

The Fortress and Communion prayer provides a structured way to begin the healing process and restore a sense of peace and balance, emotionally and physically.

 

Step 1: Building Your Fortress

The first part of the process is about protecting your heart, which McClow describes as creating a “fortress.” He likens it to the walled city of Jerusalem, with your heart being the Holy of Holies at the center of the Temple that must be protected. Visualize this fortress (like the walls around the city) and imagine placing those who have hurt you outside its walls.

McClow suggests that clients use vivid imagery, such as catapulting people out of the fortress, to create a physical and emotional boundary.

“When you get them outside, you want to feel a physiological shift,” he said. This shift might be felt in areas like your stomach or chest, where tension is stored. If the initial boundary doesn’t create enough relief, mentally push them farther away (a tropical island, the moon, Mars, etc.) until you feel a noticeable difference.

Step 2: Transferring Negative Emotions

Once the fortress is established and the hurtful individuals are outside, the next step is to transfer the negative emotions to Jesus. This is where the “communion” aspect comes in. Imagine Jesus on the cross outside your fortress, absorbing all the anger, hurt, and negative energy from the person who hurt you.

“Let all the anger, all the rage, all the hurt from that person go into Jesus,” Dave advised.

This step is about visualizing the transfer of these emotions, allowing Jesus to “take the hit” for you. It’s a deeply spiritual and healing process, McClow said: “Jesus is kind of our emotional sanitation department: he picks up our garbage, processes our sewage, and takes care of it for us.”

Step 3: The Resurrection and Transformation

After transferring the negative emotions to Jesus, ask him to take them through the resurrection. This step involves transforming the negative energy into something positive.

“In physics, you can’t destroy energy; you can only transfer or transform it,” McClow said. “We’ve transferred it; now we’re going to transform it.”

Visualize this transformation as an explosion of love and light, turning the negative into something beautiful. This step can be deeply felt, with some people imagining fireworks or other vivid images.

Step 4: Spiritual Communion

The final step is to ask Jesus to offer spiritual communion to everyone involved. This includes not only yourself and the person who hurt you but also extends to intergenerational healing.

“Ask Jesus to give communion—his infinite love—to everybody involved,” McClow said. “This includes your ancestors, any souls in purgatory connected to the event, and your descendants, ensuring that the healing permeates through generations.”

Sometimes, his clients are still reluctant to ask Jesus to give their enemy or persecutor communion. “If you’re still mad at the bully, you can visualize infinite love knocking him on his butt,” McClow said. “Because infinite love coming into a finite suffering is impactful. So if you need to do that, that’s fine.”

“In the Depths of the Heart’

The Fortress and Communion prayer draws on many sources in the Catholic tradition, but it takes particular inspiration from the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s reflection on the lines about forgiveness in the Lord’s prayer:

“It is there, in fact, ‘in the depths of the heart,’ that everything is bound and loosed. It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2843).

That quote is the entire process in a nutshell, McClow said: “You can have the memory without the feelings. That’s purifying the memory by transforming hurt into intercession.”

The Fortress and Communion prayer is versatile and can be used in various situations, from dealing with past traumas to handling daily annoyances. Like many forms of contemplative or meditative prayer, it gets easier with practice. At first, you may want to set aside 15 to 30 minutes to walk through the process thoroughly. Once it becomes habitual, you will be able to do it in a few minutes—say, when you’re sitting in a frustrating work meeting or trying to be patient about a crying baby on the plane.

You can see a video walkthrough of the Fortress and Communion Prayer on YouTube.

If you’d like McClow to guide you through the process, or if you’d like to work with another Catholic counselor on healing and forgiveness, reach out at CatholicCounselors.com.

Fasting From Falsehood

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The Lenten season has arrived. For some, this season is a time of great healing, blessings, and connectedness to God. For others, this time is challenging or comes with feelings of sadness or suffering. But what really is the point of Lent? And whether it is difficult or peaceful, how can we use this time to strengthen our relationship with God? 

A common Lenten practice focuses on sacrificing, or giving something up for 40 days. The intention of this is to say, “Lord, I love you more than I love this thing that I am giving up.” Then, each time we think about the thing we have sacrificed, or have a desire for what are fasting from, we instead shift our focus to the Lord and do something in that moment that leads us closer to Him. However, it’s easy for this practice of sacrificing to become twisted into the belief that we are meant to suffer throughout Lent (or in general). While this is not the case, there are two important things to address about suffering in order to understand why. 

First, we must recognize that we are not called to just suffer. Jesus did not suffer for the sake of suffering, he suffered to work for a greater good—for our greater good. This is the difference between suffering and redemptive suffering. Suffering without meaning is misery. Suffering with meaning, however, is redemptive suffering—and redemptive suffering leads to healing, works for a greater good, and leads us closer to God.

Second, it is important to understand the difference between what St. Ignatius referred to as Consolations and Desolations. Consolations are movements of the Holy Spirit that lead us closer to God and help us move towards meaningfulness, intimacy, and virtue in our life and our relationships. Desolations are moments where satan is whispering in our ear and we are being lead towards feelings of powerlessness, isolation, and self pity and/or self indulgence. Now, this does not mean that consolations always feel good and desolations always feel bad. Consolations can sometimes be very difficult, sometimes they don’t feel good at all in the moment—but they do ultimately lead us towards meaningfulness, intimacy, and virtue. 

So how do these concepts relate to our Lenten practice? If making some sort of Lenten sacrifice leads you towards greater healing through meaningfulness, intimacy, and virtue, then that can be a wonderful focus for the next 40 days. However, if giving something up leads towards a sense of powerless, isolation, or self pity/self indulgence and feelings of empty suffering, God might be calling you to focus on something different this Lent. Perhaps if you struggle with self esteem or self acceptance a helpful Lenten practice would be to focus on taking care of yourself. This might be difficult, but would lead you closer to God by being a good steward of God’s creation in you. Maybe if your tendency is to bury your feelings or hide your feelings behind an unhealthy coping mechanism a fruitful Lenten practice would be to begin journaling daily or seek counseling. Again, this may feel uncomfortable, but would be a practice of redemptive suffering which would lead you towards greater healing and strengthen your relationship with God.

These are only two examples, however the goal and focus of Lent is to grow in relationship with God and to move us closer to becoming the whole, healed, godly, grace-filled selves we were created to be. 

If you need support throughout your Lenten journey or would like to learn more about how to move from a place of desolation to a place of consolation, check out The Life God Wants You To Have, or reach out to our Pastoral Counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

Understanding The Parable of the Talents–What Does It Mean For Us?

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This past Sunday, The Parable of The Talents (Matthew 25:14-30)  was read as the Gospel reading at Mass. As you may remember, this is the story in which “The Master” entrusts his servants with his property. One servant is given five talents. The second is given two. The third is given one.

The servants who received five and two talents respectively, doubled what they were given and pleased their master. The servant who received one talent buried it and only returned what he was given, which caused the master to punish the servant.

Over the years, I’ve heard many comments from people who are confused by this parable. Not only do they feel that the servants are being treated unfairly at the outset, but they are often disturbed by what a jerk “the Master,” who “reaps where he did not sow and gathers where he scattered no seed” appears to be.

Here are my thoughts, I hope it helps:

1. The Master who “reaps where he did not sow, and gathers where he scattered no seed,” is not a jerk.  He is God. God harvests salvation from the fields of the Devil (i.e., the fallen world). God brings good out of difficult situations. He reclaims what sin has worked to destroy.

2. The talents are a metaphor for grace (they are NOT merely abilities or money). The different sums are a sign of the receptivity to grace of each of the servants. The message here indicates: No matter how much we are open to receiving God’s grace, he gives us as much as we are willing and able to receive.

3. When the servants cooperated with grace, they saw the work of grace expand exponentially.

4. The third servant did not do anything with the grace he had been given because, literally, he “was afraid.” Fear separates us from grace.  Think about it.  Grace is the presence of God.  God is love and “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18). 

The third servant did not cooperate with grace. Instead of clinging to God, he clung to his fear. Ultimately, the third servant separated himself from God by choosing to focus on his limitations over God’s Providence.

5. Grace will not be thwarted. Even when we resist or reject God, he finds ways around our resistance and redistributes it to those who will receive it and cooperate with it.  God’s will will be done!

Superficially, this seems like a harsh parable but ultimately, it is about the superabundance of grace, the generosity of God, and the fact that nothing–not even our fears of our own limitations–can stop grace from building the Kingdom.

Praying With Small Children

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Praying with small children can be difficult. They tend to be wiggly and have short attention spans. When little ones are involved, it’s easy for family prayer time to seem more like…Wrestlemania. But you can have a meaningful prayer time with small children if you remember that little people need different spiritual food than bigger people.

Faith develops in different stages from early childhood, to middle childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.  Children around 6 and under are in what’s called the “intuitive-projective” stage of faith. But we like to call it “the cuddly stage.”

In the “cuddly stage” of faith development, children believe something is “true” and good if it FEELS loving, and safe, and friendly.  They believe something is “false” if it FEELS stiff, cold, and unrelatable.

You can focus more on things like prayer-posture and getting prayers “just right” as kids get a little older.  But in the “cuddly faith” stage, the best way to nurture your child’s faith is to make prayer-times–and other experiences with the faith–affectionate, inviting, imaginative, and even playful.

Let your little ones cuddle in your lap when you pray with them. Be affectionate.  As you hold them, concentrate on letting them feel God’s arms around them and letting them feel God’s love filling their hearts through you.  

Sing kid-friendly praise songs together. Use different voices when you read them bible stories or saint stories. Make it fun.

Engage their imagination by asking them to pretend that they were actually in the stories.  You can even act those stories out together!

By understanding the spiritual food that a small child’s faith requires, you can help fill their hunger for God. 

To explore more ways to help your kids fall in love with the faith, check out Discovering God Together: The Catholic Guide to Raising Faithful Kids.

How To Pray Together as A Family

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When you’re praying as a family, is it better to use the formal prayers of the church–like the rosary, traditional Grace-at-Meals, or a chaplet—or more conversational prayer?

We say, “Why not both?”  It isn’t that one type of prayer is better than another type.  It’s that they serve different purposes in our spiritual lives.

In our family, we like to think of formal prayers as the, “family prayers of the Church.”  They connect us with the saints and angels and all the other members of our Church past and present! Praying the rosary with our kids, or the divine mercy chaplet, or an Our Father, or even traditional “grace-at-meals,” is like going to visit God alongside all our spiritual aunts and uncles and cousins. It’s like inviting the whole church to pray with us, so we’re never really alone.

But sometimes–just like it’s good to get more personal time with the people you love–it’s good to talk to God using words that are uniquely our own.  Conversational prayer allows us to talk to God about our day, to thank him for specific blessings, ask him for special help, and discern his unique and unrepeatable plan for your life.  

Helping our kids become fluent in both conversational and formal prayer allows them to experience their faith as something that is both personal TO them and bigger THAN them. 

To help your kids have a more meaningful experience with all the different kinds of prayer the church has to offer, check out Discovering God Together: The Catholic Guide to Raising Faithful Kids

How to Cultivate Meaningful Family Prayer

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Praying together as a family—at all—can seem intimidating.

Life is busy, and because of this, most families are happy just to make prayer happen, much less make it meaningful.  But there’s good news! You don’t have to be a saint or have perfect kids to have an awesome family prayer time.

So how do we make our prayer time meaningful and teach our kids to have a personal relationship with God?

First, make family prayer a regular part of your everyday life.  Pick a time you’re already naturally together–like dinner time or bedtime–and make spending some time with God part of that routine.

Second, remember that family prayer isn’t just about saying words AT God.  It’s about both helping your family enter into a real relationship WITH God, AND experiencing the Lord as another member of your household.

Third, it is important to teach your kids to talk to God just like they were talking to the person who knows them best and loves them most—because He does! 

Regardless of whether you’re using formal prayers, like the rosary, or taking a more conversational approach, gently encourage everyone to slow down and really think about what they’re saying. 

When you’re using more formal prayer with little ones, don’t forget to discuss what those strange words and phrases like “bounty” or “full of grace” or “trespasses” mean. You can’t have a real conversation if you don’t know what you’re saying!

By remembering that prayer is meant to be an actual conversation with the person who knows you best and loves you most—God!—you can make sure your kids learn to pray with their whole heart.

Want more ideas for celebrating a meaningful family prayer life? Check out Discovering God Together: The Catholic Guide to Raising Faithful Kids!

Prayer and the Reality of Distraction

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Guest post by Deacon Dominic Cerrato, Ph.D. Director of the Pastoral Solutions Institute Spiritual Direction services

If you’re anything like me, you’re easily distracted in prayer. I don’t think a day goes by when, praying the Divine Office, my mind doesn’t wander somewhere between the psalms and the reading. At times like these it’s not uncommon to become frustrated feeling that we’ve cheated God out of some essential prayer time. As a result, we can strongly identify with Hamlet’s King Claudius who, while attempting to repent of his brother’s murder says, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

While there is some truth to Claudius’ words, we ought not take them too literally. This is because God hears distracted prayers more intently than loving parents hear the words of their distracted children. Attentiveness in prayer is not for God’s sake, but for our own. Focus helps us to concentrate on the goal of all prayer which, if it’s from the heart, is intimate communion with Jesus Christ.

Virtually every saint dealt with distractions in some form or another. In our fallen yet redeemed state, coupled with our human frailties, it’s almost impossible to eliminate distractions completely. The best we can do is minimize those we can, and constructively accommodate those we can’t. The great Carmelite mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, understood this well. Writing in the 16th century, she observed.

I was more anxious for the hour of prayer to be over than I was to remain there. I don’t know what heavy penance I would not have gladly undertaken rather than practice prayer….the intellect is so wild that it doesn’t seem to be anything else than a frantic madman no one can tie down….All the trials we endure cannot be compared to these interior battles…[Yet,] do not imagine that the important thing is never to be thinking of anything else and that if your mind becomes slightly distracted all is lost…think of distractions as mere clouds passing in the sky, momentarily taking your gaze from the Sun of Righteousness…

Properly understood, distractions are anything that prevent us from giving our full attention to God. They are more noticeable when we acquire the habit of prayer as opposed to praying occasionally. Distractions sneak into our interiority, capturing the imagination and diminishing the encounter with God. They arise out of a great many factors typically categorized as the world, the flesh, and the devil. That acknowledged, there are a few things we can do to minimize the number of distractions and their negative impact.

To start with, it’s quite helpful to begin prayer by finding the right place to pray. It should be quiet with just the right amount of light to allow you to see – assuming you are using a devotional, Scripture or even a holy object like a crucifix. Posture likewise is important. For instance, too comfortable a position, like a nice overstuffed chair, may lead to drowsiness. Conversely, too uncomfortable a position, like a hard-wooden chair, may lead to further distractions. Settling down is helpful as well. To the extent possible, we should spend a few minutes before prayer in calming silence, placing ourselves in the presence of God. This disposes us to recognize His voice in prayer so that we may better accomplish His will.

With place and posture set, and the calming accomplished, you may wish to begin prayer by asking our Lord for the grace to stay focused. This is less a challenge with vocal prayer as opposed to mental prayer since the simultaneous “saying” and “hearing” can help keep us focused longer. Timing our prayer may also be quite helpful. If you find you’re too tired to pray night prayer before bed, then do it an hour before bedtime. I can assure you that God doesn’t have a specific time frame when your prayer is heard.

Beyond these practical suggestions, there are a couple of other ways to deal with distractions. The first and most effective of these is just to ignore them as, “mere clouds passing in the sky.” If, while praying, we become aware of a distraction, we should simply let it go and return to prayer. According to St. Francis DeSales, “If all you do is return to God after distraction, then this is a very good prayer. Your persistence shows how much you want to be with God.” This persistence means that, despite the distractions, we are intent on seeking God. If we get distracted 15 times and we return to God 15 times, God is pleased with our steadfastness.

Sometimes, a distraction is not really a distraction. This is particularly true when we’re dealing with a major struggle that dominates our thought process. In this situation, we find it almost impossible to escape the struggle as it continually encroaches on our prayer time. Depending on the nature of the struggle, this could be the prompting of the Holy Spirit calling us to redirect our prayers to that difficulty. This differs significantly from other kinds of interruptions. Where distractions lead us away from prayer into our drifting imagination, dealing with a struggle simply redirects the focus of prayer such that we are still praying. The fact that we’re still praying ought to confirm for us the influence of the Holy Spirit and therefore not a distraction in a strict sense.

Looked at positively, distractions, far from impeding the spiritual life, can provide a means to draw closer to Christ. Though they remain an interior battle throughout life, by cooperating with grace, they become less an irritant and more a routine spiritual exercise.

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