Whether our thoughts swarm about like hungry sharks or swirl like shoals of skittish sardines or languidly weave in and out like trout through labyrinthine coral reefs, they can be either a distraction from prayer’s prime purpose … or its servant.
Most of us find “thoughts” during prayer a “distraction”. But a “skilled fisherman, watching for fish” knows better. A skilled contemplative watches skillfully: patient, calm, awake, alert-yet-relaxed, focused on the here and now rather than nervously following the movement of the fishy thought.
In prayer our thoughts are a distraction as long as it is we who are had and run by our thoughts instead of the other way round. As soon as I am possessed by my thoughts, it is I who am caught.
Let the thoughts simply be there, like fish in a pond, a stream or an ocean. Do I have these thoughts? Or do these thoughts have me? Are they contained within the ocean of my heart, in the stream of my soul, the still pond of my mind? Or have they swallowed me whole?
Simply observe your thoughts. Neither pursue them nor flee from them. Avoid either aversion or obsession by simply observing with detachment—a certain peaceful distance, a silent stillness, a vantage point of freedom.
“I am not my swirling thoughts. I am not my teeming emotions. I am not my complex of feelings. I am not my incessant narratives. I have these thoughts, emotions, feelings; and stories I tell myself about them. But they do not ‘have’ me…. Because I myself am but a 'thought' ... a word ... a story ... told by the Word of Truth, Christ: my True Self.”
That’s how “thoughts” cease being “distractions” in prayer and become the servants of prayer's prime purpose: union with God.
In prayer the only thought worth being caught up in is God’s thought of me. For—as that skilled contemplative, Thomas Merton, put it—it is “I” who am “a word containing a partial thought of God”.
In prayer God is the "skilled fisherman" who watches and catches me … and heaven’s net is wide.
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