One of the greatest difficulties in persevering in mental prayer is the feeling of futility that virtually every Christian experiences. Maybe it’s a feeling of dryness: that you’ve prayed for a while, and God seems silent, and your emotions feel unmoved. Perhaps distraction or fatigue got the better of you. Or perhaps you’ve got a nagging question in the back of your mind, like “Am I doing this right?” or even “Am I just wasting my time?” Whatever the case, when those times come, I find myself returning to two invaluable spiritual insights.
The first is that, as God reminds the prophet Samuel, “the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Sam. 16:7). Or as he says to Isaiah, “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:9). In his marvelous book Difficulties in Mental Prayer, Dom Eugene Boylan points out that this is true of how we judge our times of prayer as well:
If we could only realize how much this continual turning back to God shows Him our real love for Him and pleases Him more than that rapt attention that has its roots in self-love, we should never be dissatisfied with our prayer on account of its numerous distractions. If prayer be a lifting up of the mind to God, then every time we turn away from distractions to renew our attention to God, we pray—and we pray in the teeth of difficulty and despite ourselves. What can be more pleasing to God? What more meritorious?
We should be very greatly surprised if we could get a glimpse at the account book that the recording angel keeps, and see the different values that are set on our various attempts at prayer. The prayer that pleases us, and with which we were well satisfied, would often be quite low in his estimate, while the prayer that disgusted us, which was apparently made up of nothing but distractions, might be found to have won a very high degree of approval.
The second great insight comes from the French philosopher Simone Weil, who said in a letter to a Dominican superior on Catholic education,
The Key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.
That is, in both studying and in prayer, there will be times when the answers don’t come as easily as you’d like. And the key in both cases is the same: to persevere. In doing so, you’re growing discernably in a spiritual discipline that will aid you later on—even if you never get the particular answer you were looking for! If Weil is right, it’s not a coincidence that St. John Vianney, the patron saint of priests, was a poor student, since “the useless efforts made by the Curé d’Ars, for long and painful years, in his attempt to learn Latin bore fruit in the marvelous discernment which enabled him to see the very soul of his penitents behind their words and even their silences.”
We would do well to consider Weil’s suggestion that “the love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘what are you going through?’” Or to put the matter another way: patient and loving attention towards another person is called “love of neighbor,” patient and loving attention towards something we’re trying to learn is called “the virtue of study,” and patient and loving attention towards God himself is prayer.