Reflection on Prayer

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall...

It has been 415 days since I retired. Keep that number in mind please, because we will return to it in a moment.

One of the tasks I set myself to when Nummi closed and I found I had lots of time on my hands was to establish for myself a daily prayer routine. I never had one. In fact prayer was one of those areas of my spiritual life that I had pretty much relegated entirely to the Church.  I prayed when I went to Mass on Sunday (to which I was faithful)  and on Holy Days  (which ones I didn't forget and for which I could get time off). After some contemplation and experimentation, I have indeed developed a daily prayer routine that feels good to me. It is substantive enough to look and sound like real prayer, and it is comfortable enough to feel genuine. If you account for the time for development, a couple of disruptions from life events that necessitated trips back East, and of course the effects of my own inertia, I have employed my daily prayer routine somewhere between 250 and 300 times over the past 415 days. Compared to my previous track record, it is a remarkable accomplishment.

Yet, we must put this in perspective. One of the sage bits of inscrutable Oriental Wisdom that Toyota imparted to us at Nummi was that you must perform an operation one thousand times in order to become proficient. Thus a couple's love making becomes established in the first year, and any novelty introduced after children arrive remains just that, a novelty, as there is no longer an opportunity to achieve proficiency. Of course that's a plus or minus kind of number -- at Nummi, some people could pick things up almost immediately, and others, like Fred, were on schedule to achieve proficiency in a thousand years. Interestingly, a thousand repetitions was a good estimate of how long it would take for elements of the job to begin to become second nature. By this measure, I am somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way to point where my daily prayer routine becomes proficient.

I raise these issues because yesterday I had one of those epiphanous moments that make you stop in your tracks and squawk. My eight year old granddaughter was talking to her mother in the living room. From her vantage point, she had a clear view of mirror on the wall directly behind her mother. Being eight and naturally vain, she watched herself in the mirror as she spoke to her mother.

"Wait, wait, wait,"  her mother said. "Who are you talking to?"

"You," my granddaughter said.

"Then why are you not looking at me?"

I am pleased with where I've come with prayer this past year, but if I am honest, I have to admit that I am still a bit preoccupied with whether or not I look good praying. I am watching the words come out of me, posturing a bit to see if I look holier.

At Nummi, every time you trained on new job, you knew there was going to be that period of time when you felt awkward. When you were a new hire, it was very daunting and even discouraging. Later on, you got to recognizing it for what it was. You knew you had a thousand repetitions between you and competence, and while there was no shortening the process, you knew that little by little your body would respond.

In another 700 repetitions of my daily prayer, in a little less than two years if I can discipline myself, I am pretty sure that I will be able to stop looking in the mirror when I pray.

"...when these things have been repeated to us and in us a thousand times over, we begin to learn to trust simply to the word and power of God, beyond and against appearances ..."
                                                                -- from The Letters of John Newton