Why Is Prayer So Hard?

The Fr. Mike Schmitz Catholic Podcast

Ascension

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.9 • 7.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2019

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Growing up Fr. Mike thought prayer should be like soaking in a hot tub. He didn’t understand why it was so hard when he tried it.

It took him a while to learn that, as the Catechism says, prayer is a gift of grace and a determined response on our part. Prayer always presupposes effort. There’s always some kind of engagement when we properly pray to God. It’s not just about soaking in God’s grace. The required effort in prayer is difficult more often than it is not. Prayer is a battle against ourselves and “the wiles of the tempter who does all he can to turn man away from prayer” (CCC 2725).

Over time, Fr. Mike discovered that prayer needs to be more than a momentary time where we seek solace and closeness with God. We need to constantly acknowledge our relationship with God throughout the day, just as a husband and wife are constantly thinking of each other. Then when we do set aside time to simply be with God, it happens more naturally.

If you want to improve your prayer life, make the intentional and faithful decision to live the same way outside of prayer as you do within prayer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is Ascension Presents.
0:11.6	So when I was a teenager, it was when I kind of came to know that God was calling me to
0:15.6	be a saint, right?
0:16.6	So I mean, I was raised Catholic and at some point it was like, wow, this is real, this
0:20.3	is huge, this is amazing.
0:22.5	And I knew at that moment two things.
0:24.1	I knew I needed to be a saint.
0:26.0	That's that's the whole point of life.
0:28.2	And I knew that didn't know how to be a saint.
0:30.7	Actually, sorry, I knew four things.
0:32.0	I knew I needed to be a saint.
0:33.2	I knew I didn't know how to be a saint.
0:34.6	I knew I needed to pray and I knew I didn't know how to pray.
0:37.3	So all these things conspiring together was like, what the heck, what am I supposed to
0:40.6	do?
0:41.6	How do I be a saint?
0:42.6	I don't know.
0:43.6	How do I pray?
0:44.6	I don't know.
0:45.7	And so instead of like, I probably could ask somebody like, hey, how do you do this kind
0:49.0	of thing?
0:50.0	But I don't know, I'm not going to say I was a shy person.
	...

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