Sometimes the best way to pray is not to pray. In times of pain or anxiety or sorrow, praying might only increase the awareness of our misery and make us even more agitated or afraid. We pray in panic or desperation, bartering with God, begging God for a miracle. The harder we pray, the more desperate we feel.
God already knows; God is already working. What we need to do is slow down, try to enter into quiet and breathe in God like silent air. Calm down, stop pleading, let go and receive. But receive what? I believe what we receive when we manage to calm the mind and heart is our innate capacity to give ourselves what we need. Inside us is the power to neutralize for a time whatever is causing us pain or anxiety. Even the simple act of focusing on breathing in and out slowly, rhythmically, can calm us more than praying in an agitated state. Then, in the calm, the silence and peacefulness, God speaks. We hear God in the pauses, the quiet between.
—from the book Song of the Sparrow: Four Seasons of Prayer
by Murray Bodo, OFM
