life of prayer — St. Matthew's Church Blog

Who Will Wake Me Up?

One of the great gifts of being a priest is being able to have frequent, good conversations with children in the parish. Their questions are my favorite because they come from an unpretentious—and often unrelenting—sense of curiosity. But one must be cautious. Their occasional and developmentally appropriate tendency to pepper adults with questions proves disarming until, all of the sudden, they ask something so central to the human heart and the life of faith that we can only be halted. For those who’ve been given the privilege of teaching children, our role is always to be ready for these moments. They can and do have the potential to make a life-long impact and much depends on what we are prepared to say when the opportunity arrives.

Obstacles to Prayer

Like all real and good things that take practice, prayer doesn’t always come easily. In fact, as we grow in prayer, we can expect to have seasons where it is downright difficult to pray. There are a lot of reasons for this. When the newness of a habit begins to wear off and we settle into a pattern, we begin to experience new challenges to our disciplines of prayer. It is important for us to remember that difficulties in prayer are not necessarily a sign we are doing something wrong. In fact, experiencing difficulty in prayer can be a sign that we are doing exactly what we need to do. Here are some of the common difficulties that face a person who is learning to pray:

Why Making Matters

We have faced the blank page. We have attended to silence. And we have accomplished an incredibly brave thing: we have gotten something on the page. It is not blank anymore—we are free to keep working toward a finished piece, whatever that might be, however many drafts it may take us to get there. We have committed to the creative act, and to whatever it may show us as we follow it through.

An Objective Offering

We have practiced silence. We have listened for the voice of the Spirit. We have put pen to paper, brush to canvas, spade to soil, knitting needles to yarn. Now what?

The Creative Act

In the next three blog posts, we will consider what I call “the creative act.” Before we dive in, let’s ask a question that may seem obvious: What is the creative act?