Let’s be honest. Trying to do Advent during Advent is really hard. We are told to pray and meditate, to clear out our inner clutter, and to focus on the coming of Christ—not just as he came 2000 years ago but as he may come in the people and events of daily life. Yet these weeks before Christmas are a veritable cesspool of distractions, anxieties, and episodes of overindulgence and credit card overexposure.  This makes prayer and reflection difficult, to say the least. No sooner do we start to pray, that all these unfinished tasks in our outer life flood our inner life. We discover after twenty minutes of prayer time, that we have spent the entire time thinking about how big a turkey we need for Christmas, what sort of gift we should buy for Aunt Stella, whether we paid our Visa bill last month, and how many drinks we had at the office party and what we said to people towards the end when everything got a little fuzzy. Are our efforts to pray and to focus on Christ doomed to failure this time of year? Well, I am certainly no guru on prayer; but we can turn for help to one of the most influential twentieth century contemplatives, Thomas Merton.

To begin with, Merton offers several helpful reminders about what prayer is and what prayer is not. Prayer is not, as some people think, a way of escaping from the messiness of real life. Nor is it an escape from the material world into the spiritual world. Rather, he says, the purpose of prayer is always to grow in love. Love may be the most important gift we can give to other people in stressful times. Maybe we resent spending money on Aunt Stella because she is such a downer at Christmas dinner. What if we could feel more sympathy for whatever hurts or scars lie behind her negativity. Maybe the gift that she needs more than anything is our love and acceptance. Jesis taught us to love our enemies. Prayer helps us get better at that. This applies not only to individuals whose presence on earth we resent, but also groups of people we dislike or consider our inferiors. During this present war, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are running rampart. Without excusing the awful things that have happened in this war, prayer can tamp down our prejudices and enable us to see the world through God’s eyes, the one who truly loves everybody equally and mourns every senseless death.

Merton also tells us that growing in prayer does not lead us to become detached from material things. “We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God.” There is no evil in anything God created, Merton tells us. The problem is our using these things for selfish and sinful purposes. Prayer teaches us to see things for what they are and not just for what they mean to us. We can enjoy the celebrations of the Christmas season without over-indulging in them or using them as an escape from the rest of life. We can also enjoy the blessings of God’s creation, as long as we consider how our choices impact other people on the other side of the world.

So, what about distractions? Merton says that everyone has them. We should not fight against them, but allow them to remind us that prayer is a gift from God. It is not something that we accomplish. Even the desire to pray comes from God. Prayer requires humility and a desire to surrender to the will of God. Our inability to conquer distractions teaches us that we are creatures and that we are utterly dependent upon God. If we persist in prayer, the mind and memory and imagination will not exert so much control over us. In New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton writes, “It is the will to pray that is the essence of prayer, and the desire to find God, to see Him and to love Him is the one thing that matters. If you have desired to know Him and love Him, you have already done what was expected of you, and it is much better to desire God without being able to think clearly of Him, than to have marvelous thoughts about Him without desiring to enter into union with His will. No matter how distracted you may be, pray by peaceful, even perhaps inarticulate, efforts to center your heart upon God, who is present to you in spite of all that may be going through your mind. His presence does not depend on your thoughts of Him. He is unfailingly there; if He were not, you could not even exist. The memory of His unfailing presence is the surest anchor to our minds and hearts in the storm of distractions and temptations by which we must be purified.”

                                Fr. Joe