The deeper connection

Ordinary chitchat is not the stuff of intimacy, but regular contact is because, as the chitchat is going on, something deeper is happening (for good or for bad) under the surface.

Imagine you live in proximity to your mother and you make a commitment to visit her three times a week. Over the course of a year, that means you will be visiting her about 150 times. How many times, among all those times, will you have a deep conversation with her? A dozen times? Five times? A couple of times?

This is also true of our prayer lives and our relationship with God. If we make a commitment to sit in private prayer every day for half an hour, how many times might we expect that we’ll feel a deep movement of soul, a stunning insight, or an affirmation that really warms us? A dozen times a year? Five or six times a year? Perhaps.

Most of the time though our prayer time will be a lot like those visits we make regularly to our mothers. We will treasure those times when something special breaks through, but those times will not be what’s really important. What’s really important will be what’s growing under the surface, namely, a bond and an intimacy that’s based upon a familiarity that can only develop and sustain itself by regular contact, by actually sharing life on a day-to-day basis.

In describing one of the deep movements within mature prayer, John of the Cross writes: “At this point, God does not communicate himself through the senses as he did before, by means of discursive analysis and the synthesis of ideas but begins to communicate himself through pure spirit in an act of simple contemplation in which there is no discursive succession of thought.”

Think about that the next time you are talking trivialities with your mother – or get bored in prayer. Log that time together and relish the sweet moments when they surprise you.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation