One discouragement in prayer is knowing that you are not praying as you ought. It is not just the intentions you might pray for or the attempts to have a conversation with Jesus. For me, it is all the distractions in prayer. Even more so, the interior distractions that take your focus away.
In general, the saints have told us that when we realize we have become distracted, is to return our focus to praying. Repeat as necessary.
St. Teresa of Avila talked about such tendencies as “wild horses.”
Whoever experiences the affliction these distractions cause will see that they are not his fault; he should not grow anxious, which makes things worse, or tire himself trying to put order into something that at the time doesn’t have any, that is, his mind. He should just pray as best he can; or even not pray, but like a sick person strive to bring some relief to his soul; let him occupy himself in other works of virtue. This advice now is for persons who are careful and who have understood that they must not speak simultaneously to both God and the world.1
So there I was, kneeling in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament with minimal external distractions and popping in and out of prayer. If somebody had been in a mental lane behind me, they would be calling 911 about the probably drunk driver ahead of them. I am distracted by thinking about distractions and wanting to return to some attempt at prayer. If only I could get warnings when I am veering off. To quickly return my focus.
So I thought about how cool it would be to have Botts’ dots, those round, raised pavement markers that warn you when you are losing focus and get you back on the straight and narrow. I think, maybe I should write about this metaphor. So convoluted of going from prayer to distraction, to thinking about distractions, thinking about metaphors for distraction, then thinking about writing about distractions.
I once joked my strategy should be to sit down and spend time in distraction before Mass, and that prayer would break out to interrupt my attempt at distraction.
I had recently heard a caller to Catholic Answers Live talk to Jimmy Akin, complaining about his ADHD and difficulty in prayer. To loosely paraphrase what Jimmy said, he talked about how it is part of our survival mechanism that we are not totally focused on only one thing. That we have a certain “bounciness” and that the called just had more “bounciness.” That is a metaphor I can absorb and to bounce back when I am aware of my bounciness.
- St. Teresa of Avila, “The Way of Perfection”, Chapter 24, 5
