Let’s be honest. Prayer can be very boring! I know a monk isn’t supposed to admit this. But let’s be honest. In an exhortation included in the service for the Mystery of Holy Confession, the priest says to the penitent: “hide nothing from the physician of souls and bodies.” Hide nothing, be honest. How else can the doctor prescribe a treatment unless we’re honest about all our symptoms, even the ones by which we’re most embarrassed. And what could be more embarrassing for a professional pray-er than the admission that his prayer is, well, so often just so boring.
This problem is well recognized by the Fathers. Here’s something St. John Climacus wrote in his Sixth Century, Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 13, “On Despondency”:
At the third hour the demon of despondency produces shivering, headache, and even colic. At the ninth hour the sick man gathers his strength. And when the table is laid he jumps out of bed. But the hour of prayer has come; again the body is weighed down. He had begun to pray, but it steeps him in sleep, and tears his response to shreds with untimely yawns.
Restlessness in prayer is actually rather a good sign in some ways. It proves, firstly, that we’re actually doing some prayer, albeit imperfectly. Wasn’t it Chesterton who said that if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly? Well that’s certainly the case with the thing most worth doing in all the world! So don’t be discouraged by the tedium. Instead see it as a challenge to be overcome. But in order to overcome it, we need to think about the roots of the boredom: where does it come from? What follows is one suggestion based on my own experience.
It seems to me that one of the main reasons we find our conversations with God so tedious is that the person we’re speaking to isn’t really God at all. Not the real God. Some version of God we’ve made up to replace the real One.
I think the evidence for this is that anyone who perseveres in prayer does so because at some point, or maybe even at multiple points, he or she has experienced something of the real God. Some moment of clarity, of awe or joy, something numinous and impossible to express in words. We know what the real thing is. And the “God” we speak to regularly in prayer just isn’t the same God at all. How could he be? He’s so boring!
Why do we content ourselves with this boring counterfeit god, with an idol? There must be some payoff for us? Looking at myself, I’m convinced that most often I prefer my own version of god to the true God because the god I invent is generally easier to deal with than the One I find in Scripture, Tradition and in the better movements of my own heart. The real God, the God who reveals Himself, is a jealous God, a God who requires repentance and fidelity, perseverance and stability. He requires me to stop doing things I enjoy, like gossip and over-eat as ways of keeping anxiety or fear at bay. Instead He calls on me to cut off fear in a deliberate choice to trust Him, to cast my anxious mind into the fire of His love, to risk everything for Him.
No way talking to a God like that will ever be boring. And no wonder, perhaps, that I’d frankly rather tolerate a certain level of dullness in talking to that version of myself I call “God” than let the real Lord reign in my life.
Of course there are kinds of idols than the undemanding banality that I’ve specialized in crafting in my head. Some idols are far from boring, at least at first. Some produce fine emotions, or at least a kind of sentimentality, that satisfies for a while. Some idols are even more bizarre, frankly scary, like the so-called “god” who demands constant sacrifices of pleasure, relationships and other good things of life.
But the sure sign of every kind of idol-worship is that, eventually, the payoff stops. Sooner or later the idol fails us.
The psalmist begins his great book by telling us that the righteous “delights” in the law of the Lord. The Word of the true God does not fail, however difficult it may be to approach it, however much we need to repent, believe, trust, hope and reform our lives in order to receive that Word.
If prayer is boring, let me suggest that the last thing I should do is try to fix my way of praying: looking for a more “dynamic” parish, or a more “interesting” spirituality or experiment with a new kind of church music, or art or architecture. Chances are I’m not bored by prayer, but by myself. Chances are the problem isn’t my way of praying, but my way of living.
Blessed is the man, says that same first psalm, whose delight is in the Law of the Lord, and who meditates on that law day and night. Blessed is the man, in other words, who prays without ceasing to the God, the real God, who’s creating and re-creating Spirit never disappoints. And let’s be really honest. Isn’t that the One we’re looking for?