How's Your Prayer Life? (StVdP)

How's Your Prayer Life?
Reflection for St. Vincent de Paul meeting, Monday, October 12, 2015
By Dcn. Bob Bonomi

How's your prayer life?  It seems like I pray a lot, and although there are many types of prayer - blessing, petition, intercession, thanksgiving, and praise & adoration - it also seems that most of my prayers are either petitions or intercessions: I always want something for myself or for someone else. That can be especially true for volunteers like those of us with St. Vincent de Paul. We want so badly to help those who come to us, and when their needs are greater than our ability to help, we pray that God would some way intervene or cause a miracle to happen for them.  I imagine that the sense of helplessness and frustration that comes with not being able to do more for our clients or that our prayers for them aren't being heard can affect our prayer life.

I started thinking about this earlier today as I read a reflection asking, “What do you do when you have trouble praying?”  I'm sure we all have had days like that - no matter how hard we try, that sense of talking with God isn't there.  We may want to pray, but the words just won’t come forth.  So, what do YOU do?

For me, I often resort to the Rosary.  The repetitive prayers and reflection on the mysteries, even if I’m doing it half-heartedly, serves to distract me from other thoughts and forces me to focus on God.  I saw a cartoon earlier today which was called, "The First Rosary".  In it, we see the Virgin Mary standing beside a very young Jesus with him saying, "Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom..."  That's US! In the Rosary, we stand before the Blessed Mother - our Mother – calling out like a child, “Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom..."  We don’t know what else to say.

When we hit those periods of dryness, we should ask ourselves a question: why do we pray? Or maybe more importantly, how do we pray? Is our prayer life "balanced"?  How often in our prayers are we conscious of the need to pray in ways beyond just asking God for something?

Even in our dryness, we need to try and reach out to God with more than our hat in our hands. We need to talk with Him with praise and adoration in our voice – or at least with recognition of our dependence upon Him.  It forces us to recognize the good things in our lives and helps us remember those times when our prayers were answered.

So, the next time when you feel frustration that your prayers are not being answered as quickly as you like or in a manner that you want, or you’re just experiencing dryness in your prayers, find yourself a “praise and worship” song and sing it to God.  Then say a Rosary and ask Mary for help.  You may be surprised by what happens next.