Prayer: Bicycling Uphill

A personal note to my readers — please forgive my absence of several weeks. My explanation / excuse / rationalization follows.

Life happens. It’s unavoidable. Trying to stop the relentless progress of events from hour to hour or day to day is futile, as is any attempts we might make to try to stop the emotions that accompany the torrent of experiences washing over us. There is no real choice in all of this. It is, as they say, what it is. Our part in this drama is but to choose how we shall respond to these experiences and the feelings that accompany them. There are times when what we experience borders on “overwhelm” and we want either to run away as fast and as far as we can go, or to shut down entirely and just pretend that we’re OK (while knowing that, in fact, we aren’t). At these times, the temptation (that we pray not to be led into) we face is to give up. “It’s too much.” “I can’t go through with it.” “I give up.”

In my own life, I find myself over-dramatizing the difficulties I face. It’s not that they’re not real — they certainly are for me, even if others might not find them so — but they become convenient invitations for me to make them more difficult than they are because they can serve as handy excuses to avoid responsibility. Like so much in life, perspective creates my reality. The lies I tell myself can so easily determine what I can and can’t do.

I’m an adult grandchild of an alcoholic. As an “adult child”, I have inherited certain personality traits common to most of us. One of these common traits is this: “Adult [grand]children of alcoholics lie, even when it’s easier to tell the truth.”¹ When I first saw that statement, I refused to believe that it applied to me. I prided myself on my honesty. It was only much later, as I went deeper into the experience, that I realized that the one I was most skilled at lying to was me. If I can’t tell myself the truth, how can I be truthful with anyone else?

Why the self-analysis, and what does this have to do with prayer? Oh, just everything! You see, I started writing this blog after resuming my practice of doing a formal morning and evening prayer from the Divine Office². That prayer provided me with the inspiration that fueled my writing. When I came to the last few weeks before my retirement, life started to get in the way of my prayer. By the time I had finally left work, my daily routine was gone, and so was the time I set aside for my morning and evening prayer, as well as writing these articles.

I justified my distance from formal prayer because life got really crazy: we had to pack up all our stuff and prepare to move across country. Then we shipped everything. Meanwhile, I came down with a respiratory virus. When it improved, we left to drive across country. On the trip, it came back and turned to pneumonia. When we got to California, we found our house renovations were two months behind and we had nowhere to live. We’ve been staying with friends and living out of a single suitcase each since then. At no time along the way did I “feel like” praying.

So, here we are. It’s so easy to find excuses for doing the necessary little things that keep life moving smoothly, even when it isn’t. I’m really good at saying “I can’t” when what I really mean is “I won’t”. I lie. And prayer is frequently the first practice to be tossed aside when my mind tells me, “Life is too hard right now. Take it easy.” Prayer doesn’t produce any immediately tangible results and, after a very short while, doesn’t usually bring any particularly good feelings with it. In fact, it’s like pedaling a bicycle uphill. It’s a strain. So I stop pedaling. And it takes me a while to realize that, when I stop, the results are predictable: I start slipping backwards downhill. It suddenly dawned on me: no prayer, no reflection; no reflection, no articles.

So there it is. I said my morning prayer this morning and suddenly knew what I wanted to write. Now that I’ve put it out there for God and everyone, I’ll have no excuse. You’ll know that the next time I skip my writing, it’ll be because, once again, I found an excuse to stop pedaling.

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