Contemplation 3: Distractions

One of the main themes of silent prayer is stillness – moving from stillness of body to stillness of mind and eventually stillness of heart. But in practice, many people experience something quite different. As soon as they try to be quiet before God, distracting thoughts and emotions fill their mind and take away their focus. Why does this happen? What does it say about our prayer? And what can we do about it?

The first stage – stillness of body – is the easiest. Usually we can adopt a suitable posture with no points of tension and learn to relax our body, taking slow and deeper breaths. Learning to slow down and breathe properly is worth doing in itself, in the breathless society that we live in.

Any silent prayer tradition will recommend that we do something at the start of our period of silence to help us focus on being in God's presence. It can be as simple as listening to our breath going in and out. We might focus on a simple word or phrase. For example repeating the name 'Jesus' in our minds, as the two syllables match the rhythm of our breath. In eastern Christian traditions, the Jesus Prayer is commonly used: 'Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

But whatever method we choose, we will probably find our focus disappearing as our mental processes re-engage. Our minds begin to wander. Thoughts about the day's business, feelings about people we have met, and inner tensions may arise. All these things can occupy our attention almost without us realising it. And this can take up quite a lot of our time. It is easy to feel that our prayer time has been wasted.

The first point is that these distractions are a natural and inevitable consequence of the human condition. We may try to quieten our minds, but they continue to operate and they generate all sorts of thoughts and ideas. This affects everyone, from those taking their first steps in silent prayer, to those who have been practising for years. It says nothing about the quality of our prayer, either in itself or in comparison with others (and in this field of life, we should never make comparisons).

At some point in our prayer, we will become aware that our attention is elsewhere. The right thing to do is not to engage with the distraction, but simply to acknowledge it and push it away. Just let it go. It helps to return to what we were focusing on before, whether that is our breath, or a word or phrase. We just return to God. And we do this time after time, every time. The distractions do not go away, but eventually we will get better at dealing with them in the right way. There is absolutely no reason to feel discouraged.

We may also find, eventually, that we are better able to maintain our concentration on the subject of our focus. Remaining in a concentrated state does help to keep distractions at bay. And it has other benefits too – as practitioners of the ancient and modern art of mindfulness tell us. See for example Jon Kabatt-Zinn in a classic mindfulness text entitled Wherever You Go, There You Are (Hyperion, 1994):

A calmness develops with intensive concentration practice that has a remarkably stable quality.

Christian authors also speak of the virtue of persistence. Here is Benignus O'Rourke, in Finding Your Hidden Treasure (DLT, 2010):

It is a long way from the surface of our lives, a long road from the troubled mind to the place of peace in the centre of our being. ‘The longest road,’ wrote Dag Hammarskjöld, is the journey inward. Between you and him lie care, uncertainty, doubt. To reach the place where Christ awaits us we need to be prepared for long periods of silence and quiet, long enough for our doubts to dissolve, our cares to lose their urgent pressures, our uncertainty to give way to trust. To wait in silence for as long as it takes is to be taken eventually to the still centre where we find that the mind has become quiet and the heart is at peace. And, in the stillness, we find God.

In some strange way, the distractions may serve a positive purpose. In the stillness, emotions and painful thoughts that are buried deep in the psyche may start to emerge. The mental health profession is well aware of this. Spiritual writers know that the process of silent prayer can be healing in itself as the God who himself praying in us through the Spirit gets to repair our inner damage. 

The point is made well by the North American writer Cynthia Bourgeault, who is associated with the Contemplative Outreach network. This is from her book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cowley Publications, 2004):

What really happens when one enters the cloud of unknowing, resting in God beyond thoughts, words, and feelings, is a profound healing of the emotional wounds of a lifetime. As these wounds are gradually surfaced and released in prayer (one simply lets them go non-possessively, rather than retaining them for inspection as in psychoanalysis), more and more the false self weakens and the true self gradually emerges.

The psychology of healing is one of the main themes of her book and has its own section with two chapters on The Divine Therapy and From Healing to Holiness. Her insights show us how God is using our own prayer practice to heal us of our own psychological wounds (many of which may be self-inflicted). 

Anyone troubled by distractions should bear in mind the advice that Tim offered to Dawn at the end of The Office Christmas Special: ‘Never give up.’