Pray as You Can, Not as You Think You Must
In this series, I meditate on one maxim at a time for a few weeks, and then share my reflections. You can read all the maxims here.
Pray as you can, not as you think you must.
One of the most beautiful things about Orthodoxy is its treatment of the individual person. Our relationship with our Spiritual Father creates a place where we are known, with our personal quirks, sins, abilities, and struggles. We are not all prescribed or held to the same rule of prayer. A confessor does not give the same spiritual advice to each person.
This year, I was talking to my Spiritual Father about my prayer life with my husband. He asked me when we normally pray together, and I told him that we pray in bed right before we go to sleep. This is the manner that we have been consistent with prayer. I was ashamed to admit this, because I know the ideal is to stand before our icon corner, with prostrations, with incense and candles burning. His response surprised me: “Good. Keep doing that.” I was shocked, because I had expected to receive a correction. Even now, the grace of this reaction brings tears to my eyes. In my mind, I held a clear picture of how I “must'' pray, but instead, I was given the grace to pray the way that I am able to.
When I focus on what I should do and expect perfection of myself, I am disappointed and ashamed when I fail to meet those standards. When I was in college, I attended a nondenominational Bible Study. Most of the time was spent discussing personal experiences, and one girl mentioned that she was struggling with the pressure of feeling like she should do x, y, and z. She comically referred to this as “shoulding all over herself,” a phrase that has stuck in my mind since. How often do I tell myself, “I should be praying more. I should be able to stick to my prayer rule by now,”? While this may be true, it is not helpful, and more importantly, it reveals that I am relying on myself, rather than Christ. Rather than making repeated renewed commitments to myself to keep my prayer rule and feeling frustrated when I fail to keep it, I need to ask Christ, “Direct my will and teach me to pray. Pray you yourself in me,” and trust that in Christ, I have the strength to stand up each time I fall down.
I hope and trust that Christ is teaching me to pray, and that in relationship with my Spiritual Father and praying as I can, not as I think I must, I am growing closer to Christ. When I feel tempted to compare my prayer life with others’, it is helpful for me to remember that Christ asks different things of different people. He asked Peter, Andrew, James, and John to leave behind their fishing nets, the paralytic to pick up his mat and walk, the one whose demons were cast into swine to go and tell everyone what He has done for him, and others to go and tell no one what He has done for them. He doesn’t prescribe each of us the same specific actions. Ultimately, though, he asks the same of all of us: “Follow me.”
