‘I can’t pray.’ Are you sure?
St Teresa of Avila is both encouraging and totally realistic about difficulties in prayer. She speaks honestly of her own reluctance to pray at one stage in her life, and says that she would rather have endured many penances than practise prayer. Such humility lends weight to the advice she gives. She observes also that most difficulties in prayer are caused by “praying as if God is not there”.
That’s one of those simple-sounding insights of great profundity. It makes me realise how little I know about prayer, for I recognise the tendency in myself to pray as if God were not there. It is my own experience of prayer which preoccupies me to a disproportionate extent. Humanly speaking, one cannot be indifferent to this experience, but it is it not the object of prayer. When it is my own experience of prayer which predominates, it is equally almost certain that I am applying the force in the wrong direction.
