Catholic Prayer: Four Great Obstacles and How to Defeat Them

Second Key to Spiritual Growth: Forming the Habit of Prayer & Spirituality

I’m going to read your mind. Are you ready?

I sense that you have a great desire for spiritual growth. You want a stronger relationship with God that brings meaning and significance to your life. You want a life centered on love. But you struggle. You can’t bring yourself to pray as you know you should. You want God to be the main priority in your life, but you can’t seem to order your life that way. You are frustrated, and perhaps (I sense) even fearful for your soul.

How close did I get?

OK, confession time. I wasn’t really reading your mind. I was actually telling you the frustration that I have faced in my own entrance into the life of Catholic prayer. And I am guessing that I am pretty darn typical. If you are reading this article, then I know that you have a great desire for spiritual growth. If you’re a fallen human person, then I am going to guess that you are facing the same frustrating roadblocks to that spiritual growth that I am.

The good news is that I think I have discovered the source of our problem – and the solution. It all comes down to developing certain virtues that we have been trained by our culture to pretty much ignore.

So, I am going to describe the main obstacles to Catholic Spirituality as I see them, and discuss solutions to each one. Then we’ll see how all of these solutions can be summarized into two virtues – prudence and charity.

The Main Obstacles to Catholic Prayer

No time (distraction from prayer)

Let’s start by facing the top excuse on all of our minds. “I just don’t have time to pray.” Father Larry Richards is fond of telling us that if we can find time for other things – television, hobbies, golf, fishing, going out with friends, or anything else – but we don’t have time for prayer, then we love those things more than we love God. Sound harsh? Listen to what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say:

“It expresses itself less by declared incredulity than by our actual preferences. When we begin to pray, a thousand labors or cares thought to be urgent vie for priority; once again, it is the moment of truth for the heart: what is its real love?” (CCC 2732)

Sure, our desire for spiritual growth shows that we have a love for God. What is missing is the translation of our love for him into real-life priorities. I’m not convinced that 100% of the problem is a lack of love. I think it’s a lack of the discipline we need to order our lives according to our priorities. That’s why I created the Planning for Grace program. This program takes you through a step-by-step process for reclaiming control over your life, ordering your life according to your priorities (which means making God our top priority), and discovering ways to cooperate with grace by shaping our lives according to how we are created and what we are destined to be. Planning for Grace will (among other things) help you to dedicate yourself to time in conversation with God every day.

No habit

Once we get control of our lives and make prayer a priority, we will still find it difficult to actually enter into prayer unless we have done the hard work of making it a habit. A habit is a tendency to perform some action readily and easily because we have done it over and over again until the act has become second nature to us. I have done a pretty good job of ordering my life around my priorities. I have scheduled a specific time for prayer into my day, and I can no longer claim that I don’t have time to pray. But I still struggle. Why? Because I find disciplined focus really hard.

So I’m at the point where I need to work at it. And that’s OK. I just need to recognize that it’s going to be difficult at first. And I need to be disciplined enough to just do it anyway. The more you pray, the easier it will get. Practice really does make perfect. Once you reach the point of establishing the habit, taking the time to pray will become much easier and natural to you.

Then, not only will you be able to attend to the time of prayer that you set aside each day, you will find it much easier to “pray always” – continuing your conversation with God throughout your day and going through your day connected to him.

Distraction in prayer

Your trials don’t end there, though. Once you break through your distractions from prayer, you will run into the obstacles faced by most of the spiritual masters in the Catholic tradition. The first of those is distraction within prayer. Even though you have made your relationship with God your top priority, even though you have carved out the time each day, even though you have established the habit, you will still find the concerns of the world breaking into your communion with him and drawing your mind away. The solution to these distractions is not to follow some formula for hunting them down and overcoming them.

“To set about hunting down distractions would be to fall into their trap when all that is necessary is to turn back to our heart: for a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve” (CCC 2729).

Focus on God. When you lose your focus, bring it back. If stray thoughts enter your mind, draw them into your prayer, or just expel them from your mind and refocus. This is a simple solution, but far from easy. If you find yourself at this stage of spiritual growth and need some help, you might want to sign up for my “Spiritual Path” course. This course takes you step-by-step through the process of spiritual growth in great detail. It shows you how conversion and prayer are closely related, how to advance on the spiritual path, and how to enter into prayer with your whole mind and heart (thus defeating these distractions).

Dryness

The final major obstacle is “dryness.” Dryness describes a lack of emotional connection with God. There are times that he will bless you with “consolations” – unmistakable signs of his presence. The most common consolation is an emotional sense of his presence and love. Other consolations may include more miraculous signs of his presence

• praying in tongues (the heart and mind are absorbed in prayer and you begin praying in a language you don’t know because the Holy Spirit completely takes over your prayer)
• spiritual rest (an overwhelming sense of peace)
• locutions (actually hearing Jesus speak)
• levitation (floating in the air).

These consolations are meant to help our faith – to show us that he is truly present.

But these consolations do not happen for all people. And when they do happen, they don’t last. God knows that if he let you, you would become addicted to these consolations. Your Catholic spirituality would become about what you get out of it rather than about a true relationship with him. That’s why God also causes us to experience dryness. Dryness can be seen as learning us how to “walk” – with our Father taking a step back from us and encouraging us to walk toward him without his support. As we grow in our Catholic spirituality, we may even experience more intense dryness known as the “Dark Night of the Soul.” This is a period of time when God allows us to experience his complete absence, to see if we will trust him through it.

We handle dryness by focusing on our love for him, and by trusting that he will give us what we need to bring us to him. That love and trust will keep us connected to God. Even if our dryness or Dark Night should last our entire life (as it did for Blessed Teresa of Calcutta), love and trust in God will keep you connected to him, and eventually – even if that ‘eventually’ is in Heaven – all dryness will end and we will live in the glory of God’s love without end. In fact, the dryness may just be a share in the sufferings of Jesus – an incredible intimacy that Blessed Teresa of Calcutta experienced and taught about!

For the beginner, prayer is going to be hard work. We need to establish the habit of prayer in our character. We need to open our hearts to listen to God. The spiritual masters called this stage of prayer “ascesis,” a term that means labor and struggle. I have created a course to guide you through this period of ascesis. The course is named the same as this tutorial – “Practical Prayer” – but it goes much deeper than we go here. This course will lead you step-by-step through the process of establishing a habit of prayer and gaining the right attitude toward prayer. If you’re willing to do the work of approaching God in stillness, this course will show you what work you need to do. Click here to find out more about the “Practical Prayer” course

My course on the “Spiritual Masters” covers consolations and the Dark Night of the Soul in great detail and shows you how great saints dealt with them through their spiritual journey. Click here to learn more about this course.

So, those are the four greatest obstacles I see us facing as we enter a life of Catholic prayer.

1. Distractions from Prayer
2. No Habit
3. Distractions in Prayer
4. Dryness

The good news is that we don’t face all four at the same time. We tend to face them in order as we grow in our spiritual life. What obstacles do you face in developing a strong Catholic spirituality? Do you face the same obstacles I describe here, or are there others that I haven’t mentioned? Please let me know in the discussion forum below!

This article is part of a series on Catholic prayer. In our next article, we’ll get dig more deeply into how to establish the habit of prayer in our life, especially through the virtues of prudence and charity.

Brought to you by Jeffrey S. Arrowood at From the Abbey, dedicated to helping you rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith so you can grow in intimacy with God.

Don't Miss a Thing! Follow "From the Abbey" on Social Media!