Prayer, Waiting, and Distractions I just got back from a weeklong silent retreat in Arizona on Tuesday. From what I’ve heard about the weather here while I was gone, it sounds like I timed it just right! One of the biggest graces I received on the retreat was a greater understanding of the importance of “waiting” in prayer. I think our general tendency is to pray, but then promptly give up when it seems like God isn’t speaking to us. It does indeed seem like he isn’t listening or speaking sometimes, but there is a great mystery here. It is by means of the silence and the waiting that God brings us deeper, beneath the surface level chatter that our hearts and minds are normally occupied with. A good biblical example of this is the way God spoke to Elijah (1 Kings 19). A wind came, but the Lord was not in the wind. An earthquake came, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. A fire came, but the Lord was not in the fire. But there was a quiet whisper. This was how God spoke to him. This reveals that God’s most powerful way of speaking to us is in the silence - much more powerful than the flashy ways we might expect. Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles we face when trying to pray and wait in silence is distractions. Or so we think. You might be surprised, but saints like St. Theresa of Avila don’t actually consider distractions something to be concerned much about. St. Theresa, in fact, experienced a great deal of distractions herself. Even during a time in her life where she was regularly receiving lofty mystical experiences in prayer she wrote about having a distracted mind after receiving Holy Communion. The lack of control we have of our mind is simply a consequence of our weak fallen nature. We shouldn’t be surprised by it at all, and, more importantly, we shouldn’t get distressed about it. Listen to what St. Theresa wrote in her autobiography regarding distractions: “So I return to the advice – and even if I repeat it many times this doesn’t matter – that it is very important that no one be distressed or afflicted over dryness or noisy and distracting thoughts.” (Life ch. 11, no. 17) In another place she writes: “When one of you finds herself in this sublime state of prayer, and the thought wanders off after the most ridiculous things in the world, she should laugh at it and treat it as the silly thing it is, and remain in her state of quiet” (Way, ch. 31). So there you have it. You or I never need to get anxious about distractions in prayer again. St. Theresa is a doctor of the Church after all. Instead of getting distressed about our wandering minds, we just need to try to turn our mind back to God while remembering that he does not expect us to pray like the angels. We are like little kids before him, and this is not a problem because, as he says, “Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Mt 19:14) Fr. Sandquist