Beginning with St. John of the Cross
A healthy humility will always advise us to think of ourselves as beginners in prayer. We are lifelong students in the school of holiness. Why would prayer be any different? But there is a difference, between beginners in prayer and those who are more advanced. It has to do with where we must focus our efforts.
Prayer is a battle, the saints tell us. Maybe that’s why I can say, probably without exaggeration, that most Catholics do not have much of a prayer life. This is not to criticize or to make people question their salvation. It’s just a fact. For many years, that was me.
I was born into a Catholic home and raised in the Church. I remained single well into my 30s, pursuing at various times my education and a series of careers. Through it all I maintained an interest in intellectual and spiritual growth, which to me meant, almost exclusively, reading books.
I tried different forms of prayer, but nothing really stuck. Why? I think it was because I had a basically transactional approach to prayer: if I do this particular thing in prayer, then that particular outcome will follow. When the outcome I expected didn’t follow, I assumed my prayer technique was deficient, and I didn’t want to perpetuate deficiency.
Transactional prayer can focus on the needs of others. We can ask God to favor someone with health, a job, a return to faith, relief from sorrow, or any other good thing. Petitions of this type are perfectly appropriate, as long as they always end the same way as Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane ended: “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.” Mt. 26:39. This prayer becomes transactional when one starts feeling betrayal or despair. Why isn’t God listening? Why doesn’t He care? Maybe He’s not there at all, and I should just give up.
My transactional prayer was of a different kind. I wanted something for myself—not health, or a job, or anything like that. I wanted spiritual experiences. I wanted visions, mystical knowledge, awakenings and enlightenments. I tried various meditation methods, and made my mind as empty as I could. But my mind more resembles a 16-theater cinematic multiplex than a Zen monastery. So that didn’t work.
Then I met St. John of the Cross, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, one of the earliest of his prose works. His advice had nothing to do with posture, or breathing, or mental methods. His advice was to stop chasing after prayer experiences, and instead clean up my life. The problem was attachments, to all the things I wanted:
This dark night is a privation and purgation of all sensible appetites, for the external things of the world, the delights of the flesh, and the gratifications of the will.… One is not freed from the suffering and anguish of the appetites, until they are tempered and put to sleep.
Ascent I.1.4
It had never occurred to me that indulging the appetites in my spare time would interfere with my prayer life. It seemed to me that my life was divided between “God Time” and “Me Time,” and as long as I kept up with the God Time, what I did in the Me Time was irrelevant. But that was where I needed to begin, if I wanted to advance. The Me Time was poisoning prayer.
Whatever is hindering your prayer life, take heart. You have a lot of distinguished company. St. John of the Cross wrote The Ascent of Mount Carmel for the nuns and friars of the reformed Carmelite order. Yet he spent dozens of chapters on the importance of shedding attachments to worldly things. Now, the nuns and friars in a 16th Century Discalced Carmelite priory practiced austerity that was grueling enough to challenge a Navy SEAL. They wore open sandals, or just went barefoot, 12 months of the year. They frequently fasted on bread and water and slept on naked boards with nothing but their meager habits to warm them. And yet these same people had to begin, like us, with humble acknowledgment of their attachments, and diligent efforts to break them.
So don’t think St. John of the Cross is only for advanced people, not for you. Don’t be afraid to begin. It starts with attachments.
Further resources
The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Prologue 9; I.1.4