Daily Prayer is Best

To be a genuine Christian is to be in relationship with Jesus. Relationships require time together, and our time together with Jesus is prayer. Prayer, for the health of our relationship with Jesus, is like breathing or eating for the health of our bodies: if we don’t do it, we will become unwell. Sadly, sometimes we just don’t feel like praying: certainly I don’t always feel like it. I suppose we are all already a little bit sick because of original sin, and just as we sometimes don’t feel like eating when we’re sick, sometimes we don’t feel like praying either.

The Church is wise and knows that we need regular prayer for our spiritual health, just like we need regular meals for our physical health. So the Church asks us to attend mass weekly, whether we feel like it or not. But is weekly mass enough? Could our bodies survive on one meal a week? Yes, maybe survive, but flourish?

I think it wise to set aside a period of time for prayer every day, even if it is only ten minutes. Better a short time, faithfully kept, than something longer but irregular. Decide the amount of time before starting, and stick to it. Sometimes prayer will feel good, sometimes not so good, but that’s OK: it does not matter what it feels like, what matters is that we keep doing it. It is best to pick a time in the day where our schedule best allows it to be regular, with least likelihood of interruption. For me, it is the morning, first thing after getting up. For others it might be the evening, or some other regular time during the day. What matters most is not when we pray, but that we pray.

Keep in mind, we can get away with irregularity a bit when it comes to eating, because if we skip dinner too often, our feelings of hunger will remind us to eat, and if we gorge at meals we will feel uncomfortably full. But if our feelings about food were not working properly, we would have to be disciplined about eating or we’d either starve or burst. Sadly, because our feelings about prayer are often not working properly, we sometimes need to overcome feelings of reluctance to pray, making prayer feel rather more like work than it should. But genuine commitment to a relationship always requires work, to get through the difficult times. Jesus worked through outrageous difficulties to love us: we can look at a crucifix to see a reminder of that. Surely we can manage a few minutes a day for him, even if it sometimes feels dry and unproductive?

About how to pray, much has been written on that: my advice, for what it is worth, is to try some of the various things recommended by the Church until you find something that works well for you. But all the books on how to pray make little difference if we do not actually make the time in our day to pray. If we do that first, and commit to it faithfully, no matter what sort of prayer we end up doing, our relationship with our Lord will be the better for it.