coffee, chairs, and long hair

There are many things that are needed for good reflective prayer with the scriptures. Unfortunately, I found out one of them the hard way. A good environment is definitely needed. For some this may mean silence. For me, a little noise in the background, such as a TV on the other side of a wall, is fine. A bad place for me to pray, however, is a room filled with artwork and books that are not religious. One night on my silent retreat, I made the mistake of going into a parlor room filled with sculptures, pottery, paintings, books, you name it. It was a newly remodeled room, and a nice one at that. But there was a book sitting in front of me calling my name the whole time. Of course, if I had not looked at the book before praying, my mind may have been set at ease. But instead, my mind was amazed at all of the ante-bellum buildings in the area that I had not seen yet. Instead of focusing on the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, I was instead thinking of the best way to get over to Sacred Heart Academy, which was built in the 1830s!

My point—when going to pray, a suitable environment must be picked out. It must be one that you know you will be able to concentrate in for a given period of time. If you cannot concentrate well, then you won’t get much out of your prayer. Maybe for a rule of thumb, you could ask if you could do your calculus homework in there. No, praying isn’t like pulling teeth or rocket science. It just needs good concentration and as little distraction as possible. After all, isn’t that what prayer is—leaving behind the distractions of the world to find God?