Obstacles to Prayer

Like all real and good things that take practice, prayer doesn’t always come easily. In fact, as we grow in prayer, we can expect to have seasons where it is downright difficult to pray. There are a lot of reasons for this. When the newness of a habit begins to wear off and we settle into a pattern, we begin to experience new challenges to our disciplines of prayer. It is important for us to remember that difficulties in prayer are not necessarily a sign we are doing something wrong. In fact, experiencing difficulty in prayer can be a sign that we are doing exactly what we need to do. Here are some of the common difficulties that face a person who is learning to pray:

A Little Leaven

My sourdough starter, Xeno, turns ten this year. Short for xenophilius or, roughly, ‘the one who loves the stranger,’ he has helped us to create food both sweet and savory to host anyone who comes to our house, to provide a gift for friends and family in seasons both festive and mournful. Xeno has sired many starters over the years, and the last I checked is now officially a grand-starter with his composition of yeast and lacto-bacilii replicating as we speak in mason jars all over Southern California.

How Romantic!

One of my most formative educational experiences came in the first weeks of my first class as an undergraduate in the English Department. The impassive professor of my British Literature survey called on me to define the term ‘romantic.’ I offered a vague, listless response, which revealed nothing but that I had not adequately prepared for our seminar that day. With a stern gaze through thick glasses he stared at me and declared, “Butler, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Only With Claws

In his Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis tells the story of a young boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb who, through habitual self interest and a careless fixation with a dead dragon’s hoard of gold, becomes a dragon himself. When the dragon-boy encounters the Christ-figure of the novel, the great lion Aslan, Eustace is informed that in order to become ‘un-dragoned,’ he will have to wash off the dragon skin in a nearby well. Eustace sets to work, and begins to scrub layer after layer off of himself, diminishing his dragonish stature until he reaches one final, intractable layer of dragon-skin that scrubbing cannot remove.

Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. The advent of Christ – that Coming we’ve anticipated for weeks – is imminent. Like the virgins who await the bridegroom in Matthew 25, we must wake up and trim our lamps. The Bridegroom comes. It is time to meet him.

Wordlessness

The Story of a Soul is St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s spiritual autobiography. It tells the story of how, at a very young age, she conceived a passionate desire to become a Carmelite nun. She fought hard to be admitted early entry, and took the veil at the young age of 15.

Telling Stories

Once upon a time there were no stories. Nearly 14 billion years worth of tales untold until suddenly, Man, sitting around a fire telling stories. Some were true, some were lies, and some were fictional but somehow still true. But what is a story? When someone asks for “your story”, when my mom used to make sure she was home at noon every day to watch her “stories”, or when a reporter “smells a story”, is the same word being used for the same thing or is there a core thing we call a story? How can a painting tell a story, or a piece of music? How can a shoe on the side of the road have a story behind it?

Why Making Matters

We have faced the blank page. We have attended to silence. And we have accomplished an incredibly brave thing: we have gotten something on the page. It is not blank anymore—we are free to keep working toward a finished piece, whatever that might be, however many drafts it may take us to get there. We have committed to the creative act, and to whatever it may show us as we follow it through.

An Objective Offering

We have practiced silence. We have listened for the voice of the Spirit. We have put pen to paper, brush to canvas, spade to soil, knitting needles to yarn. Now what?

The Creative Act

In the next three blog posts, we will consider what I call “the creative act.” Before we dive in, let’s ask a question that may seem obvious: What is the creative act?

Apollinarianism

Despite the undivided church coming together at the Council of Nicaea to lay out the basics of its understanding of the Trinity in the year AD325, the heresy of Arianism continued to flourish. If you’ll recall, Arianism posits that Jesus was not eternally present with God the Father but was rather a created being. That is why the Nicaean Creed states of Jesus;

Praying for the Civil Authorities

One of the gifts of good liturgy is that we do not have to question it every time we approach it. Good liturgy is elegant, challenging, and familiar; it draws us out of ourselves without fear of harm. From time to time, however, it is good to ask why we do what we do in order that we might remember that there are reasons for what we do, that we are able to articulate those reasons, and so that the faithful might have greater confidence in the soundness of the liturgy and thus more willing to submit themselves to it.

Prayer, Liturgy, Christian LifeFr. Hayden ButlerOctober 14, 2023prayer, liturgy, civil authorities, america, united states

The Case for Animal Blessings

As a priest, one is called to bless all kinds of things, food, houses, rosaries, statues, etc., there’s even a blessing for spacecrafts in “A Manual for Priests of the American Church”! And while you’ll find a blessing for livestock and cattle, what you won’t find is a blessing for pets. The tradition of blessing the animals that sustain us and work for us is ancient but the notion that we should bless our pets is a rather recent development. Should we be making such a big deal about our pets? Should we be blessing them? The way I figure it, if we bless our homes and the stuff that fills them, we might as well bless the living things that we share the homes with.

Christian Life, LiturgyFr. John CrewsOctober 7, 2023animal blessing, christian tradition, pets, animals

Acedia and the Tyranny of Optimization

Cultures of optimization have been prevalent since the industrial revolution, but what distinguishes this current one is that it demands women to not just appear more perfect but actually to change themselves mentally and physically to meet an unattainable standard. I remember a mentor pointing out to me that the ‘it girl’ ideal shifted like a pendulum every decade from at least the 1890s onward in order to maximize consumer energy and disincentivize wardrobes that could be retained and bestowed between generations. This meant that each new decade one might find themselves more or less within reach of the cultural norm. By the 2000s, though, the use of digital and surgical technology enabled the creation of an appearance that no one could actually possess, and which made everyone inadequate.

Christian Life, Spiritual FormationFr. Hayden ButlerSeptember 23, 2023acedia, sloth, grace, idealism, optimization, tyranny, perfectionism

Acedia and the Cult of Productivity

In our last post, we concluded that acedia or sloth is much more than the stereotype of the lazybones. Evagrius notes that “acedia is a simultaneous, long-lasting movement of anger and desire, whereby the former is angry with what is at hand, while the latter yearns for what is not present.” As the modern monastic writer Gabriel Bunge elaborates: “Everything available to it is hateful. Everything unavailable is desirable.” Where there is anger that things are the way they are and there is an indefinite desire for something else, whatever that may be. Acedia is a restlessness that manifests in a refusal to commit to one place or purpose. In the meantime, acedia makes us lose our taste for what is significant and what is insignificant as we fail again and again to discern between demands for our attention.

Christian Life, Spiritual FormationFr. Hayden ButlerSeptember 16, 2023acedia, productivity, culture

Acedia

In this series of posts, we will consider the vice of ‘sloth,’ one of the more misunderstood among the vices. Before we focus on this vice in particular, though, we do well to look at what place the categories of the ‘seven (or eight) deadly (or capital) vices’ have in the Christian life. These are not a list found in the Scriptures–they do not have the same evident clarity as the Ten Commandments, the Summary of the Law, or the Beatitudes. Nevertheless, this list emerged immediately after the great persecutions ended and Christians began to have time and space (and longevity) to study and explain methodically the spiritual work of the Christian life.

Christian Life, Prayer, Spiritual DisciplinesFr. Hayden ButlerSeptember 9, 2023acedia, sloth, deadly sins, temptation, prayer

The Ground of Our Beseeching

The collect for the 10th Sunday after Trinity makes a curious request. After asking God to keep His ears open to our prayers, it asks Him to exercise His power over those very prayers: “. . . and, that [thy humble servants] may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee.”

Spiritual Formation, Prayer, Christian LifeAlea PeisterSeptember 2, 2023soil, nature, prayer, beseech, julian of norwich

Adoptionism

I was not always a Christian. In fact, I wasn’t baptized until I was 40 years old. Befitting someone whose family on his mother’s side could trace their lineage to the Pilgrims, a group who thought Calvin was too Catholic, my father was not a fan of infant baptism. On the other hand, Pappy, his paternal Grandfather, had emigrated from England and inherited from him that Anglican dislike of a firm position. The result of which was that I was to ‘make my own choice,’ which took a long, long time.

Theology, Christian LifeFr. John CrewsAugust 26, 2023theology, adoptionism, baptism

Godparents

Our parish is currently in the happy season of receiving many new babies into the congregation. Whenever we have a wave of baptisms, one of the questions I get asked is about the practice of selecting godparents or sponsors. This is one of my favorite questions to be asked as a priest. As I have been thinking through the practice of Tradition in our parish life, I realized as well that this question is directly connected to our inheritance and bestowal of the Faith. As an appendix to that series, then, I’d like to reflect here on the concept of godparents and to offer the practical advice I give to new parents when they ask about it.

Christian Life, SacramentsFr. Hayden ButlerAugust 12, 2023godparents, baptism, tradition, generations

Sabellianism

Hoo boy, we’re really in the weeds this time with the heresy of Sabellianism. I’m talking real ‘Inside Baseball’ stuff here with terms like Patripassianism, Homoousios and modalistic monarchianism’ being bandied about. But while such words are unfamiliar, once one learns the definition, they’re not such a problem. On the other hand, a far more important word in our discussion is one that is familiar to every Christian but one that doesn’t limit itself to an easy definition, rather it opens into further mystery, that of ‘Trinity’. But before we can really dig in we have to go back, way back to the dawn of civilization.

Theology, Christian LifeFr. John CrewsAugust 5, 2023sabellianism, trinity, theology

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