The challenge of silent prayer

I was with an OCDS community as a visitor the other day and they were holding a Quiet Day.  The Community President and his wife have a spacious house and a garden which, while not being particularly large, has space enough to let people sit out for meditative prayer or spiritual reading.  We ate lunch together and had a social time as well as the periods of quiet.  Silent prayer should in theory be easy for believers - and yet I have generally found it a challenge to let go of time in my mind.  I feel that this letting go of time and forgetting the clock is at the heart of such prayer.  Some people seem to fall into it quite naturally, and that is an enviable gift.  Only on very rare occasions have I been ‘taken up’ in prayer and lost a sense of time, but that was the case last Friday during the Quiet Day.  In my struggles to focus on God alone at such times, I console myself with the thought that I am choosing to offer the time to God alone, it is (if very imperfectly) the sacrifice of the heart which we are exhorted to make in the Scriptures.      

Intercessions:

Cancer: Brian Davis, Marie, Bernard (and wife Angela caring for him), Jacqui, Sue B, Theresa K, Fr Jon

Siena, Elara – sick children

Wojtek – massive heart attack leaving him incapacitated

David OCDS - housebound

Sophia – blind infant

Joy Smith OCDS – seriously ill

Grace – troubling ailments, job difficulties, family (deceased mother and health of father)