I have learned three lessons about loving God through prayer: motivation, faithfulness and deeper presence. The journey has made me more vulnerable to Him.

I learned the first lesson, motivation, through being baptised in the Holy Spirit. I had always been active in church organisations and intrigued by prayer. But I was oriented to doing what had to be done for the kingdom of God and suspicious of spiritual cop-outs. Prayer was appropriate, even fascinating, as long as it did not interfere with building the kingdom.

Being baptised in the Spirit was re-orientation from earning salvation to experiencing salvation through Jesus, falling in love with God, and being empowered by the Holy Spirit. Prayer was attractive. I had a desire to be closer to God and I experienced the power of the Holy Spirit when I prayed.

When obstacles came up, I prayed. Astonishing answers came through guidance or sudden breakthroughs in the objective order. Sometimes, for example, money unexpectedly arrived in the mail, just in time for a particular need. Motivation to pray every day came easily. I couldn’t pray enough.

As emotional motivation fluctuated, my prayer followed

This lasted for many months until the attraction and motivation died down. I experienced dryness in prayer. I knew that God’s love did not cease, but the emotional motivation that flowed from it surely did. As emotional motivation fluctuated, my prayer followed. When motivation first waned I just skipped prayer for a few days. There was plenty of motivation to do other things, and little would be missed since I returned to prayer in a few days. But as the sense of distance from god in prayer increased the few days turned into weeks, then months. My prayer needed a more solid foundation.

My failure to pray regularly uncovered a lack of faithfulness. When I did pray, the time of day selected and what I did during prayer depended completely on daily inspirations. This worked fine until the inspiration ceased. Then I put off prayer until the day was over: by that time I was too tired to pray, and rationalisations came easy. Prayer was like an enduring contest. Time spent in prayer decreased, approaching zero.

Many distractions caused by instability in my lifestyle and personal relationships

I slowly learned how to be faithful to concrete, practical ways. First I made a commitment to pray for an hour in the morning, every day, and not to compromise that commitment without good reason. Then I realised that a faithful commitment to prayer required reordering many things in my life. Getting to bed late left me exhausted during prayer. I had to drop some things from my schedule in order to pray. Many distractions in prayer were caused by instability in my lifestyle and personal relationships. Overcoming these distractions meant bringing more stability into these areas of my life.

Using the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius during a retreat helped me to appreciate the need for protective structures in my prayer. I adapted some of his methods to support my prayer.

Selecting a scripture passage or focus for meditation the night before my morning prayer time helped me to centre my thoughts on the Lord. At the beginning of prayer, I formed a mental image of the incident described in the scripture passage. This helped me overcome distractions during the prayer time. Then, after praying I wrote down what had happened during prayer, including any reflections I had on how to respond better to the Lord.

Structure serves as protection not a trap

In times of great motivation and inspiration, such a structure can fall away, taking a back seat to the inspiration of the Spirit. Yet in times of dryness, a structure guards against letting prayer simply disappear. The structure serves as protection not a trap. It might be unnecessary for months, then become crucial for a while.

Though learning to be faithful in prayer was helpful, I gradually realised that something was missing. I read dozens of books on prayer, but I wasn’t able to identify the problem. I was doing the “right things” but often I felt that I hadn’t made contact with the Lord. I knew I wasn’t entering something God was calling me into.

I learned the third lesson, deeper presence in prayer, when I spent a few months in a Trappist monastery. There I fell more deeply in love with the Lord as a new dimension of prayer was revealed through silence and reflection on the psalms. I no longer felt I had to produce anything in prayer. I just wanted to enter into the presence of God. I discovered that an important element of prayer was simply being present to him – not necessarily understanding a passage, or interceding or even talking with him. Silence and reading the Psalms became a channel through which the Lord’s presence entered the course of ordinary existence.

Purity of Heart

The Lord also began to speak to me about the purity of heart that would bring me more fully into his presence. As I understood the extent of my sinfulness in the light of God’s love and compassion, my heart began to soften. It was painfully purifying. I remember St Benedict’s words, “It is not in saying a great deal that we shall be heard, but in purity of heart and in tears of compunction.” I spent hours in the chapel pondering St Bernard’s words, “It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God.” Over and over I prayed, “Have mercy of me, O God, in your goodness, in your great tenderness wipe away my faults. (Ps 51.1) God was cleansing me, purifying me, softening my heart to make me more vulnerable to him.

These then are the three lessons I have learned about prayer: God’s gift of attracting and motivating us, our co-operation by faithfulness, made concrete, and the purification of our hearts that brings us into the deeper presence of God.

While all of us relate to the same God, each of our relationships with him is unique. My experiences in prayer reflect my relationship with the Lord. They are not the comprehensive model for how everyone should pray. The lessons I have learned could be expressed in many different ways.

Living the gospel intensely

We must remember that the foundation of prayer, the heart of it, is having an apocalyptic urgency about coming to God more deeply and living in gospel intensity. I used the word apocalyptic not in the historical, end time sense, but in the visionary sense that sees to the spiritual heart of the matter. Apocalyptic refers to revelation, in the way a stage is revealed by the opening of the curtain. Our apocalyptic vision perceives the battle between God and the evil one which underlies our struggles. When we are intensely living the gospel, the day of the Lord is at hand for us, and we know the urgency of it. It is a matter of vision, not prediction.

The foundation of prayer is to resist the tendency to water down the gospel in order to be respectable or sensible. The heart of prayer is living the gospel intensely, with the apocalyptic urgency that catapults us into a deeper response to God. As we earnestly desire to be fully responsive to the Lord, the Holy Spirit will lead us into closer communion with him.

Originally from the New Covenant magazine (December 1977) and reprinted with permission from Tongues of Fire (August 2008) newsletter of the CCR in New Zealand.

Joe Breault is the author of a “Transformed mind and heart” published by Servant Books in 1978